Not sure if you read the rest of my previous comment but Hanlon's razor is predicated on malice, so I still disagree. I never assumed assumed malice here. But

Not sure if you read the rest of my previous comment but Hanlon's razor is predicated on malice, so I still disagree. I never assumed assumed malice here. But it's still preposterous that a company with such skilled engineers wouldn't know until they were sued that they had been collecting large volumes of additional information over the span of years. That claim basically requires that this global mapping endeavour involving many people over multiple years was run by people who didn't understand the most basic aspects of wi-fi protocols but somehow flipped wireshark into monitor mode and then never looked at any raw captures anywhere to extract information from them, even while setting up collection systems used across the globe. Doing that once could be a mistake; even collecting all of the data could be a mistake; but not even realizing they had collected vastly more than beacon packets--probably over most of the planet--for multiple years? Hey...I guess anything is possible, but it doesn't pass the smell test for me.