Android damn well ought to let you lie.

This program wants my contacts? Okay, have fun spamming Blarvis Davies, e-mail TheBlarvDog@gofuckyours.elf. Camera? Random noise that looks like a lens cap. Microphone? Well make it real in this case, but if it’s a photo app, quiet pink noise.

It’s fine if the program doesn’t work, work, with fake info. Obviously if I lie to an e-mail client then I’m either typing in addresses m’self or else I’m chatting up Blarvis. Maybe not even that, if I lie about internet access, and it looks like my connection just sucks.

But any program that tries to detect real versus fake info can be nuked off the face of the store.

If we’re worried that your grandma will somehow enable those protections, but be unable to tell they’re on, we can make the fake data even more obvious. After all - the program should never make any effort to detect this kind of chicanery. It can be blatant. FakeName@check-your-settings.grandma. A camera image of light grain applied over the words “you disabled camera permissions.” Though the mic probably has to stay as a quiet hiss.