Four months ago, amidst a backlash from government regulators and privacy advocates, Google stopped collecting Wi-Fi data with its Street View cars. But that doesn’t mean Google has stopped collecting wireless data altogether, and neither have other companies such as Apple.
If someone truly doesn’t want that somebody knows about his home network, then he must use the good and old wires.
When you broadcast some information using radio waves, it means that this information is now public. You can scramble the data, but you can’t prevent someone from receiving it. If this data is being logged by a company and that someone can use a router flaw to get your address from that data is irrelevant: there is far easier ways to unwilling get someone address, and this form of “hack” relies so heavily in the “luck factor” that is almost impossible to gather information from a specific target without a good deal of information about that man already.
I don’t think that even the user are unaware of that: they knows that wi-fi is, in his essence, a form of radio, and that you can’t “bend” the radio waves to stay inside your home (unless you build a gigantic Faraday cage, but i doubt that someone that paranoid will use a wi-fi).
What is plain unethical is using cellphones to collect wi-fi data and call home without user knowledge (not the case here).
I don’t trust them, I don’t use any of their services, I have recently moved my IT blog from google to other platform.
It is the illness of power that google is suffering from.