@AC
You obviously do not know how Wi-Fi networks work and what "broadcast" means.
Let's simplify things a bit:
- In order for a Wi-Fi network to communicate, it must send a signal over the air.
- This exposes the signal to any device around.
- If you do not want to broadcast the signal to devices outside your network, you cannot stop broadcasting the signal, for this will prevent your own network from receiving it.
So what happens when you do not want uninvited devices to participate in your network?
- The 802.11 protocol provides for this by allowing the router to mark communication packets with a "broadcast flag" indicating the intention.
- All devices listening in are expected to discard communications that has the broadcast flag set to "do not broadcast", unless the destination address (also contained in the packet header) is its own.
What about secure networks?
- Since the information necessary to understand and decrypt the communications needs to be seen before decrypting, all packet headers are not encrypted.
- The packet headers of communications intended to be encrypted, include a "secure flag" indicating this intention.
- All other information commonly in the header (including sender, destination, SSID, MAC address, and broadcast flag) is still available there, unencrypted.
So what did Google do then?
- They ignored the "broadcast flag" of all packet headers and analysed and catalogued their information, and linked it to the current GPS coordinates of the StreetView car.
- They ignored the "secure flag" of all packet headers, and did the same thing to headers intended for secure networks.
- They furthermore stored the payload of packets not marked with the secure flag, while discarding those which were encrypted.
As you can see, it is not true that "people obviously wanted anyone within 100 feet or so to have that information", because even when people clearly *DID NOT* want to--by setting the broadcast flag to "do not broadcast"--Google still scanned and stored the MAC address, the SSIDs, and all header information.
Hopefully this will clear things up.
-dZ.