GoKawiilWhile tracking permissions link activity to your specific device, sensor permissions provide data from your device's onboard sensors, such as the GPS, camera or microphone. These are thorny permissions. Plenty of apps need them for legitimate reasons, but that's no guarantee they aren't using the collected data in other ways. Google Maps won't be much use without access to your location, but Google is also using that data to "show you more relevant ads" per its policy documentation. And although Instagram needs camera access before you can use it to snap a photo for your Story, it is also scanning objects, faces and text in those photos to (take a wild guess) show you more targeted ads.
But some apps are using your data in shadier ways than others. That random weather app might genuinely need your location to let you know the weather as you travel (you can just give it your zip code to get more generalized weather at your location), but its real business may not be delivering the forecast. Instead, it might be selling user location data to as many brokers as possible. What happens to that data is far beyond your control. For example, law enforcement in states where abortion is now illegal after the fall of Roe v Wade can acquire cell phone tracking data to prosecute pregnant people who traveled across state lines seeking reproductive care or otherwise sought an abortion. In one case, a Mississippi woman who suffered a stillbirth was charged with murder because she had searched for abortion pills online (charges were later dropped), and an Indiana woman whose text messages discussed the possibility of abortion were used as evidence of feticide after a miscarriage. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Again, your phone isn't passively using these permissions to spy on you, but that doesn't mean your apps won't happily gorge themselves on the data you willingly create by using your microphone, camera, and other sensors while using the app. Modern versions of mobile operating systems will even show you when your microphone and camera are being used. On Android, you'll see a small green dot in your status bar when either the mic or camera is in use (for example, during a phone call or while shooting video in Snapchat), while on iOS, the indicator dot is green when the camera is in use and orange when only the microphone is hot.
Unfortunately, location can't be reduced to a single sensor. Your whereabouts can be triangulated based on a number of signals — nearby Wi-Fi networks, cell towers and even Bluetooth devices can be almost as effective as a GPS signal. In 2022, Meta settled for $37.5 million with no admission of fault after a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 70 million users who claimed the company's apps tracked their locations even with location permission disabled.