I’m also a little bit unclear about *why* Google allowed this. They can’t have been unaware that one of their most popular apps was harvesting and uploading call and SMS history to Facebook’s servers. I refuse to believe that.
This is mostly a false narrative. For some things (hidepid/sysmon) it's partly true, but zeroing out call/SMS data would never have broken anything. CM/LOS did it with no problems.
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CyanogenMod / LineageOS used the functionality Google wrote. PrivacyGuard is a UI to AppOps, which is the same way Android's own 6.0+ permission toggles work for legacy apps.
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Providing empty data means the apps stop providing the functionality users expect, and the apps can't check to see that the permission is gone to request it from the user. It's a major usability issue. It works for power users, it doesn't work for regular people.
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Nobody expects any app to be able to read their call or SMS history. That's just not a reasonable functionality to provide, at all. Most also don't expect ability to read contacts.
End of conversation
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