I never have gotten a satisfactory answer to why Google Play needs access to everything including camera, mic, location and accelerometer data. But it sure chased me off of their platform...
https://android.stackexchange.com/tags/google-play-services/...
> location functionality including geofencing (notifying apps with the appropriate permission when you've entered or left a given physical region), and activity detection (e.g. walking, driving)
Right. To consolidate location tracking (and several other juicy bits) as per this story. I ran without those permissions for about a year, before I got tired of opting out of location tracking for the billionth time and installed a non-G android