The deeper answer is that economic incentives don't encourage minimal permissions, even if there's no malicious intent.
An app can request it, I'd like to say NO in a way that doesn't break the app. It asks for camera, fine it gets the same stock photo. It asks for location, it gets the Galapagos. It asks for microphone, it gets "Never Gonna Give You Up". Installing an app shouldn't be a binary (hah) choice.
Android apps now request permission at the time they need to use a feature, not on first install. They've basically adopted the same permissions model as Apple.
As that applies to the specific example in your comment, (1) people can verify whether or not a piece of open source software is listening and phoning home, (2) if it is spyware, a different programmer could make a fork and remove this antifeature, and (3) if they published the fork, now end users have the choice of using a version that does not track you.
Does this mean Open Source software never tracks you? Of course not. But it is much more resistant to this sort of thing.
The practical impact of such a change, even if it were forced top down by Google, is nil. Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.
Obviously not everyone would use the safe version because of the network effect of Google's play store. But for anyone who becomes aware of the "safe app store" and is aware of privacy risks, they'll almost certainly chose to download their apps from there.
All the more reason that things should be free software with anti-tivoization, so that the stock ROM on phones can be replaced easily. Most of android is free, but because it allows non-free parts (drivers, etc), it's a complete mess for people to tinker with devices because the method is different for every model.
You shouldn't really need root to selectively enable permissions for some apps either. The "all or nothing" approach to permissions is a poor design choice.
Overmore, your claim
> Nobody outside a tiny minority of geeks treats free software as a selling point.
is wrong. Just to give one counterexample, the European Comission is not a bunch of geeks and they strongly prefer free software.
The EC is a statistical anomaly. One agency out of how many out there?
I don't believe that. I think there would likely be a small group of people that would audit the software to create fact finding reports and others may create patches to fix software. Of course this is still subject to abuse, but there would probably reputations for certain sources.
Similar to journalism. There are a lot of first hand sources out there but the average layman does not read them. They would rather read a summary/interpretation of the facts. This is also subject to abuse. Reputation is important.
A “paper trail” back to the contents of our gadgets that can be audited, and some people would no doubt, would be much better than
“Fu society we own it all.”
Open source is the means of production today. Let’s keep it that way.
In reality the same arguments apply to adults, but we find it less morally repugnant because adults aren't innocent and are expected to gaurd themselves against such actions. However, it becomes more and more difficult to guard against.
This seems like a very mushy reason. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that children are not considered able to knowingly consent to many things - including contracts such as EULAs or TOS. Given this, a child is also not expected to be able make a reasoned decision about privacy tradeoffs.
The reason it's "ok" to spy on adults is that they can make an educated decision about whether they're ok with being spied on. I don't necessarily agree that this is true in practice, but I think that's the theory.
It should also be completely illegal, but the justice system can't keep up with technology. Imagine you found out that your next door neighbor has drilled a hole through the wall and fed a camera into your house - what do you do? (Call the police, certainly). Is it really any different when the camera feed isn't a physical wire but done over the internet?
That's wishful thinking. Most people can't tell the WWW from Facebook. People are so bad at writing emails that there are Workshops for Composing E-Mails which sell out quickly. Many disable SIM PINs because they forget them or don't want to bother remembering them. The people who read permissions an app requests make such a little percentage of smartphone users that they can't even be considered a minority.
I beleive we need some kind of CE for software. It's easier to make sure that your parmigiano reggiano comes from Emilia-Romagna that it is to make sure that you can rely on a certain online service provider / platform. That's simply unacceptable.
Most of them don't care.
Yes, and hardware at the firmware level.
We generally believe that sexual exploitation of children is worse than of an adult. We don’t allow for consensual sexual relations, creation or mere posesion of explicit material with a child.
In fact drawings of said material can get you in a lot of trouble in many, liberal, countries.
That being said, I hate what the internet has become.
My niece asked me to install some games on an old smartphone I let her play with. Out of about 15 I looked at, 15 asked for access to one or more of the camera, microphone, address book, location or just blanket ask for every permission under the sun. None of them needed these permissions for the actual game play of course.
How does Google find this kind of spying on children acceptable?