For example, a lot of innocent operations such as connecting to your headphones have been tied to locations services. Google has been abusing this to extreme lengths to extract exact user location for years now.
I think you are still right that the permissions are way too coarse-grained or have weird associations. But it seems to me, they at least partially improved the situation by switching to an ask-on-first-use model.
Of course it might still be that Google is keeping the permissions deliberately coarse to secretly help third parties with data mining. That would be sort of the same spirit as the whole "privacy sandbox" stuff.
This scheme forces you to enable it for reasons completely unrelated to your usage.
As a user you can decide this if you never use programms which need access to location, navigation programs, for example. If you look a bit further you will notice that there are a lot of google programs which have access to location like Google play games or google play music or messages etc. There are also some "system" programs for which you cannot disable location access.
That said, I don't believe this is what's happening for the headphone pairing case. It's easier and likely more fruitful to limit functionality of popular apps unless fine grained location and is enabled and you are logged in to your Google account, which is what I believe they do with Maps.
iOS is similar. But they do not give apps access to the mac address of scanned bluetooth devices which makes the platform borderline unusable for actual bluetooth apps.
But there's also the factor of battery usage, I'd like to be able to allow bluetooth but deny GPS hardware access for those occasional apps that like to trigger the GPS constantly for no good reason.
I’ve dug in much detail through what iOS makes available in the data takeout request on the Apple account level and I find it impossible to believe they include everything they have through iOS at the moment.
This is how dictator works; make a broad rule and harm everyone. We should abhor such malpractices. They should have just made separate permission for bluetooth.
Google has with every android release pushed this a bit further. In Android 12 it demands (1) background (2) precise positioning and (3) a GPS position lock.
Note also that "Bluetooth may leak your location" is actually due to this very type of data gathering.
Android didn't used to require precise location to access bluetooth. This permission got "coarser" over time as the result of people using bluetooth specifically for location.
And you'll note that Google / Pixel don't make any bluetooth tracking beacons. They didn't make this mess, they just reacted to it. The reality is letting an app scan for bluetooth means it can probably get your precise location in a non-trivial amount of places. Same as letting an app scan for wifi.
This is not true. At all.
I wish. The only phones you can get that are of a similar or smaller size to an iPhone Mini are unsupported Chinese gimmick phones or quite old. The smallest Android that still gets support is the Pixel 4a (NOT the Pixel 4a 5g, which is much larger), and that is approaching the end of its support window.
This is a non-issue for me. The last time I had to do that (to get a bluetooth headphone companion app to work), I disabled wifi and location, enabled bluetooth, opened the app, granted it location permissions, and connected to the bluetooth headset. Afterwards I revoked location permissions and reenabled location/wifi, but the app still worked.
2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again.
As other commenters have mentioned, allowing bluetooth access also potentially leaks your location. The alternative of not asking for permission isn't exactly better either. Therefore it's hard to characterize this as some sort of nefarious attempt by google to coax location information from you.
>2. If you are using an app for device management (e.g. Google Home, Samsung Wear) it will be started next time you connect and then it's permission-madness all over again.
I'm not sure how other apps work, but for the companion app I was using it continued to work afterwards, even with location permission denied. This persists across app closes and device restarts.
It also requested I signed a EULA (xiaomi). Apparently streaming video over wifi requires GPS. Who knew.
(Although, that permission will also allow everyone to see your location due to how Bluetooth works, but apparently being notified of this fact annoyed you people so much that it's fine to ignore on both iOS and Android. But there's nothing "innocent" at allowing bluetooth scans - it DOES expose your location like the permission said before.)
However, this would depend on the good will of the developer, as the end-user does not know whether this flag is set or not -- as far as I can tell.