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Unix 40 year old permission system is enough to deal with this, this is no excuse.

As far as I understand, media was (is?) stored on sdcards, which uses (can use) FAT, which has no permissions support.

It uses ext4 on the mixed mode (which incorporates it as system memory), but it should require ext4 for sd cards as well. They cut off USB mass storage support so they have already crossed that line.

The hard part is the user interface, not the backend. The application needs to invoke a privileged UI where the user can choose which files or directories the application may access.

(many storage media are formatted using FAT, so the media API is probably not implemented using Unix permissions)

I'm talking of allowing apps to mark things (like the WhatsApp data previously mentioned) to only be accessible by itself or some other app(s).

As for FAT, I said in another comment that Google has already imposed MTP on us and Android's adoptable storage uses ext4 anyway, so they could easily require it on all removable storage where application data is stored.

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