Or, you take the more extreme step, and obfuscate from the application whether or not permissions have been granted. The reason why people default to granting e

Or, you take the more extreme step, and obfuscate from the application whether or not permissions have been granted. The reason why people default to granting excess permissions is that many applications simply will refuse to run without them. If instead of "overtly deny permission" there existed the option to "covertly deny permission (by opting to feed plausible random data instead)" and making that the easier to select "deny" then you have the best of both worlds: well-behaved applications start asking for fewer unnecessary permissions, because the data they're gathering is being poisoned, poorly-behaved applications have their harm reduced, and users who want to build programs that actually need high-level permissions can do so.