Did you even read what this does? It's used to aid geopositioning. No data from the network is logged, other than its SSID/MAC address and its approximate location.
That problem is entirely due to you choosing to run Google/Apple software on a network attached computer that you carry with you everywhere (even, apparently, to poo).
Mapping the source of radio signals is common and expected. Your Wifi router is basically a big bright lightbulb that flashes with a unique pattern, and can be seen through walls. You can't legitimately ask the rest of the world not to notice it, the same way you can't request that no one use your porch light as a landmark.
No. It shouldn't be expected that a $410b market cap company is out mapping this data and selling it to advertisers. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Not a trustworthy company.
You may have missed the bits that came out about the capture going on with the knowledge of some Google employees. Th e original developer has plenty of experience with wifi data capture and knew exactly what you could do with the data as well as that you didn't need full packet dumps to snag SSIDs.
"Google long maintained that the engineer was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved, in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the F.C.C.’s report, released by Google on Saturday, has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on."
- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/technology/engineer-in-goo...
That doesn't sound like very much data for a fleet of vehicles to collect over the course of a few years. Pretty sure it was just a handful of packets per (unencrypted) access point, but please correct me if I'm wrong.
Nowadays it shouldn't, no, but Google's had some lawsuits where their Streetview cars accidentally scooped up random bits of data crossing over the wifi lines. This measure was added afterwards, iirc.
