This isn't what the article is about here. A lot of Google stuff, including Android phones, and Street View and Waymo cars, engage in Passive Wardriving [0]. T

This isn't what the article is about here. A lot of Google stuff, including Android phones, and Street View and Waymo cars, engage in Passive Wardriving [0]. They build a database mapping SSID names to GPS coordinates. This is legal, even without requesting consent, because (1) it is not hacking, since they are not actually accessing your network, but merely "approaching" it (2) it is not a privacy violation, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for wifi SSIDs. As a courtesy, Google does allow you to configure your network to not show up in their database, much like robots.txt does for websites. But it involves changing your SSID, which is a very annoying way of doing it, because you have to reconfigure everything on your network to point at the new SSID. It's probably just an underhanded way of making it annoying enough that nobody bothers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving