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Google Play wants Body Sensors

I recently had a great idea - use body sensor data to infer my emotional state while reading stuff, and have my browser give me visual cues, such as colour scheme changes, as indicators about how the page might be affecting me. A sort of 'insights' or 'early warning' feature.

So that's why Google want this data!

Google Play Services on Android wants permissions for body sensor data. I have no body sensors, so far as I know, but my phone probably provides enough sensors to infer stuff. If I did have body sensors, I would not want Google to have unfettered access to it. I disabled this permission, and I now get an error notification for almost anything phone related that happens on my phone (SMS, incoming and outgoing calls). It's really quite annoying!

I now suppose that Google want this data for exactly the same reason I want it - to infer my emotional state while I'm reading stuff. Perhaps they even want to infer my emotional state while I'm writing stuff, the data could even be timestamp correlated with any other event for which data exists (e.g. Amazon browsing, Facebook reading, Alexa interactions).

That's pretty valuable data, particularly to an industry that exists essentially just to manipulate my emotional state (is that too reductive a stance on advertising?). I'm feeling a little bit daft right now for not appreciating the enormity of the whole body-sensor thing. It felt intuitively creepy, but wow!

I really should switch sides - I love data, and these folks are accumulating it in spades. I could be wallowing in petabytes of digital gold-dust, like a cocaine addict let loose in the seized drugs pound.