[Volpe]

Wi-fi networks aren't private, you can stop a "broadcast" of the SSID, otherwise you "broadcast" it (publicly).

It's the equivelant of the the Streetview car capturing 'public property', if you want 'privacy', put up a big fence and don't broadcast your SSID.

As for the NSA issue, I'm not going to defend google too much there, but you've seen what happens to providers who didn't comply... I would put that down to more a 'The US govt is pretty hostile to privacy' more than "Google is evil".

On the scale of 'evil shit' happening in the world. Google collecting my Wifi network name ranks about similarly to 'J-Walking'...

[workhere-io]

They didn't just collect wi-fi names, they also collected other forms of data, some of which could be considered private. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/googles-wifi-wireta...