I think there's a middle ground here - first off, is it that obviously illegal? Is there an expectation of privacy, similar to eavesdropping on a conversation

I think there's a middle ground here - first off, is it that obviously illegal? Is there an expectation of privacy, similar to eavesdropping on a conversation at the table next to you? I think it is now, but if we go back to 2007/2008, it might not have been. And it might not even have been malicious - the Google engineers doing it might have said, "Hey look, if x amount of wifi data is good, X amount has got to be even better!". After all, they're data junkies, and might have decided to capture chunks of data wholesale with the best intentions (and maybe not even any clear ideas of how to use it). I'm not trying to justify their actions, just trying to posit a scenario where Google did intentionally capture wifi payloads without requiring that they had a malicious purpose to do so.