Hacker News Reader

The problem is the permissions for bluetooth are lumped in with fine GPS location permissions.

They're lumped together correctly. If you allow bluetooth access, the nearby bluetooth MAC addresses could be used to identify your location with near-GPS precision.

Or greater precision! GPS (at least as used on most phones) has a ~6 foot margin of error.

Fair enough, as long as those nearby devices have very precisely known locations in some database.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com