>Even if you deny individual permissions, apps will still slurp up your app list/hardware specs/any metadata they can get their grimy hands on
Is this a purely academic thought experiment or something that's happening in practice? I'm not exactly sure what the "999 data points" consists of. Given basically nobody assembles their own phone, the most that hardware fingerprinting will reveal is "you have an iPhone 13", impossible to differentiate from all the other iPhone 13s floating around because they're all identical. Both android and ios have cracked down on software fingerprinting as well, so you can't for instance grab a list of all installed apps.
Is this a purely academic thought experiment or something that's happening in practice? I'm not exactly sure what the "999 data points" consists of. Given basically nobody assembles their own phone, the most that hardware fingerprinting will reveal is "you have an iPhone 13", impossible to differentiate from all the other iPhone 13s floating around because they're all identical. Both android and ios have cracked down on software fingerprinting as well, so you can't for instance grab a list of all installed apps.