[dotancohen]

And none of those use cases require contacts or location permission.

You could argue that a general-purpose planner might, but that's not what Emacs is, nor do I believe that it supports parsing contacts in the format provided by the Android APIs.

[Wildgoose]

Some people use emacs as an email client - that is probably why it may require permission to access Contacts.

[crabbone]

Again, read the top post: it's not the Emacs' problem. It's the problem of how permissions are structured. Talk to your overlords at Google and tell them that their permissions system is bad. It's them who are guilty of making a bad permissions system, not the useful software that has to deal with the fallout of their bad design.