A malicious application without any granted permission could retrieve all entries from the Download Provider, bypassing all currently implemented access control mechanisms. The level of access will be similar to having the ACCESS_ALL_DOWNLOADS permission granted, which is a signature-protected permission.
The information retrieved from this provider may include potentially sensitive information such as file names, descriptions, titles, paths, URLs (that may contain sensitive parameters in the query strings), etc., for applications such as Gmail, Chrome, or the Google Play Store.