Personally, my feeling is that an unsecured access point is an accident waiting to happen.  I think that the reasons for Google capturing wireless packet payloads went no further than “it might be interesting to mine this data”.  Naive?  Perhaps.  Evil?  Not likely.

What WOULD be of concern is if Google successfully hacked into these WAP’s. Using dictionary tools. 

Then again, like millions of others, my life is not important enough to be hacked, yet I still don’t trust this company.  Never have.  

Ummm pardon my language but…BULLSHIT.  I’m really kinda getting sick of wanna be hack news sites getting this completely and total wrong.  Wardriving is the act of driving around collecting data being sent out from access points.  9 times out of 10 that ONLY includes SSID, GPS location, MAC address, and signal strength.  Your average wardriver does NOT access a wireless network.  I’ve collected over 12,000 access points in the Minneapolis twin cities area and NOT a single one has had personal information collected.  I consider it a baseball card collection.  At one point in time I and a couple friends of mine were competing to see how many AP’s we could collect.  But the above statement “to access” is complete and total crap.