The article seems to make the assumption that this data is collected by apps that would otherwise have no good reason for requiring permission to access your lo

The article seems to make the assumption that this data is collected by apps that would otherwise have no good reason for requiring permission to access your location. Seems like a bit of an assumption. It strikes me that to build a useful location dataset, just one widely used app would be more effective than any number of niche apps asking for strange permissions. I would build an app that provides many people with a really useful service that obviously requires access to your location. So it would probably provide some sort of mapping or navigation service. To consistently collect data it might well force the user to have data enabled rather than just hold the map data on the phone. Perhaps I could also shut others out of this lucrative operation, if I could just get my app pre-installed and enabled by default on every phone. Just speculating - who really knows.