The thing that people were upset about was that Google Street View cars didn't only scan the public SSIDs, but also recorded all (open) network traffic.
oh yes I remember and they still use the data they collected. I lived in Vienna for 30 years and just recently moved to the country side.
There are no wifi hotspots around me so when I set up my old wifi (same ssid as before and same hardware (bssid)) and checked my phone on google maps it was saying that I still am at the old place because it had not GPS at the moment and then google maps checked the SSIDs around me and looked up where those are located
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...