My paranoia in installing extensions is finally justified. If Amazon is pulling these kind of stunts, then imagine the kind of mischief the smaller apps are pulling off.

This whole "scorched earth"-style permissions model that users can't make educated decisions about is what annoys me about current platforms like Chrome, Android and iOS.

JavaME had an interesting model where the app asks permissions after it is installed (e.g. internet access, local file system access) for each thing it wants to do. And the app has to consider the fact that the user can decide not to grant that particular permission. Of course, once you decide to trust the app, you could disable the prompts.