Bad article, worse summary. Google isn't, like, quantizing your habits or anything. Or, maybe they do, but at the very least that isn't what the emails say.
"I cannot stress enough how important Google's wifi location database is to our Android and mobile product strategy," Google location manager Steve Lee told founder Page in the memo. "We absolutely do care about this because we need wifi data collection in order to maintain and improve our wifi location service."
It's not a database of your location, it's a crowd-sourced database of positioning information used to help users determine their location. When you encounter a previously unrecorded wifi network or somesuch and you're using this feature (it has a disclaimer about this), you anonymously add it to Google's database so other users using the feature can triangulate their position that much faster. There's a concern in the article that someone could hijack this process on Google's end and record personal information, but as far as we know from these emails and what they've said publicly, this information isn't being kept, in fact there's an encryption scheme to protect it. It's different from the Apple issue where the information was a) unencrypted b) identifiable (because it's on your phone) c) timestamped (and therefore more useful than "here's everywhere I've been in my life!") There's certainly the issue of privacy for the wifi network owners, but my point is the summary's misrepresenting the story here.
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