LineageOS already had this feature in Cyanogen as the Privacy Guard. It was taken out because of pressure from Google.

Do you have any reference for that pressure from Google? I thought it was because during one of the major version merges the underlying code changed so much that the entire feature would've needed reimplementing from scratch, like many other Cyanogenmod era features.

Edit: source here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28096873

Privacy Guard also wasn't as complete as XPrivacy (and its evolutions) were. It's a shame that the feature disappeared, but I don't think it mattered much to begin with.

You have a source on that? I used to be a lineageOS user and I always wondered why privacy guard disappeared.

I found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28096873

Looks like Privacy Guard was dropped because the rewrite wasn't worth the effort.

Thanks for that. Indeed, doesn't sound worth the effort to pursue it if google was mostly going in the same direction anyway.

Thanks for digging it up.

Sometimes I can't comprehend how people come up with that stuff when it was already publicly explained how/why it happened :/

Pressure from Google?

I myself removed that feature because the effort to have it was more of an hassle than anything else.