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There's always a compromise between security and convenience, and how much you're willing to give up of the other.

That email example might work in specific examples, but requiring the user to be a constant gatekeeper would get very tiresome quickly , particularly when it comes to things like GPS and Camera access.

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What if the operating system acts as an agent in these scenarios? Say, sending a message to a contact requires the app to make a system call which they get back a handle to said contact. All operation on that handle is done via calls to the system, so the data about the contact never actually gets to the app. It'd be annoying to write the simplest of programs under this paradigm, but the use can then completely control an app'use of their data or hardware.

This is how Android and content permissions work. It's totally possible to take a picture without permission to access the camera, and to share a contact without granting access to all contacts.

Many apps choose not to use this functionality, because they want to own the UX for contact picking or taking a picture, and most users don't know about the privacy difference between sharing a Uri with a grant permission flag, and granting access to contacts.

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