I'm also starting to believe that Android's extremely vague permissions are not that vague because of their engineers' incompetence, but because it was done this way on purpose.
Google promised at I/O that a permission system with more fine-grain control would come in Lollipop, but it's still nowhere to be seen.
Agree with this, especially after their fine-grain control App Ops, which received a very positive response, was completely removed, and the reason they gave for doing so quite nonsensical: "it can break apps" - obviously, that's why people want to use it - to prevent apps from "breaking" their personal privacy.
(My Android's ID/serial number is 0123456789ABCDEF, the same as tens of millions others out there, so I'm not so worried about it. One of the perks of owning an unbranded generic Chinese device, along with a new random MAC address whenever I reset the WiFi...)
Google promised at I/O that a permission system with more fine-grain control would come in Lollipop, but it's still nowhere to be seen.