[jacobwil]

That isn't the least bit of what's happening here. Google's streetview cars simply map your router's SSID (actually, as far as I can tell, it's the MAC address) to coordinates that the car's GPS provide. They allow for devices to determine their location more quickly than acquiring a GPS lock and more accurately than relying on cellular tower triangulation. When you combine all three, you get phones that can figure out their current location quickly and accurately.

At no level is google telling people where to find free WiFi. They simply provide a correspondence between MAC addresses of nearby routers and latitude-longitude.