So, Google could be forced to not gather this information at all. Whether its in the public interest is a tradeoff between the utility provided vs the privacy

So, Google could be forced to not gather this information at all. Whether its in the public interest is a tradeoff between the utility provided vs the privacy loss. I think its a net utility gain - I like my phone to resolve quickly, and see little downside - so I have no general objection. Some people might object strenuously to this information being gathered; they now have a mechanism - albeit kludgey - to opt-out. Could the opt-out be implemented better? You say you don't accept 'its too hard' as an excuse. But sometimes there's a limit to how well a problem can be solved, given its importance and the set of people who care about it. You could build a physical switch on the router (perhaps even one that appends '_nomap' to the SSID). But we don't expect Google to ship everyone a new router, right? If there's ever sufficient consumer demand, router manufacturers could add this feature. But there probably isn't going to be. We live in a world where Telcos track and log our locations, to a resolution of the nearest cell, or nearer, all the time. They typically have our identity and demographic information. They know who we call and message, and for how long. I'm studying social network analysis, and you can infer an awful lot from data like this. So, how do I turn my phone on 'do not track' mode? I think its pretty decent of Google to enable this feature; yes, the solution is inelegant, but the people that care enough about this can probably figure out how to enable it. I think anger about privacy violations should be directed at worse offenders.