What bothers me is that lots of applications will start throwing errors even if you disable just one permission from Google Play Services (like body sensors). Q

What bothers me is that lots of applications will start throwing errors even if you disable just one permission from Google Play Services (like body sensors). Quite some time ago Google started encouraging developers to use the google play permissions together with the respective android permission. This doesn't mean that apps can collect your data even when you disable the location permission (they still can't) but it forces you to either run google play services (with all it's permissions on) and all its data collecting abilities or basically run android without anything available from the play store. It's a really anti-competitive strategy by google, because it gives users the ability to regulate permissions for single apps effectively (limiting the ability of other companies to collect personal data) and on the other hands strengthens googles own ability to collect all your data, making their marketing platform even more valuable. It is high time regulators start cracking down on this anti-competitive behavior when it comes to data collection. Either give all companies the same chance to collect users data or give users a real option to disable it for all applications (even the ones by google).