The solution to "software authors routinely collecting more info than they should" is not "accept the behavior as irredeemable, and just normalize it".
The answer is "make ot way more visible to users when it is done, snd make it harder for software authors to do/maintain." Anything else is just a tacit acknowledgement and grant of legitimacy to the behavior in question.
Just the opposite. What this would normalize is app developers no longer be able to depend on location data being accurate, which would destroy the location data sales market by turning it into a market for lemons.
What you propose, simply yelling at developers to stop requesting unneeded permissions, would have no useful effect. They won't change. And most customers won't care and will blindly click accept no matter what if they think they have to to access their game.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Assume that other actors in the world will respond the way they usually do, not the way you think they should. That is the way to get things done.
No it wouldn't, and it'd be nigh impossible for the handset to make that judgement call. That's not a computable problem except by the User reading the code, understanding it, and toggling the fake data switch on.
Besides which, I don't care if you feed me garbo GPS GLONASS if I've war driven and reverse indexed local wireless nodes to GIS coords. There's more than one way to get at coordinates, and enough hands in the jar in terms of being honest with location data by default that it'd be an uphill battle to fight teach users just how many ways a mobile handset can potentially leak location data.
The problem is that the data is retained at all. Until that data is considered toxic/a liability, there will be no respite from it.
Not sure what your point is or what your interpretation of my comment was. So just to clarify, I think the location data sales market is a bad thing and that is why I advocate a solution that would destroy that market and give us back location privacy. It has zero benefit to users and a lot of scary downside.
(For those who are unaware, a lot of free apps pay for themselves by secretly recording location history and then selling it. This is why companies and even government agencies can buy mass location data when they want and query it to find out who was where when. This has been going on for years and is well known and documented and in no way secret. Just for anyone who missed it somehow.)
The solution to "software authors routinely collecting more info than they should" is not "accept the behavior as irredeemable, and just normalize it".
The answer is "make ot way more visible to users when it is done, snd make it harder for software authors to do/maintain." Anything else is just a tacit acknowledgement and grant of legitimacy to the behavior in question.