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By your logic, your house is a "landmark," so it'd be totally okay to surveil it. I don't think that flies.

Depends what you mean by 'surveiling' really. People seem generally comfortable with the tradeoff of streetview cars taking pictures of their house (the tradeoff being that we then get streetview in g maps).

Perhaps people are comfortable with google using their publically available SSIDs so their android phones get better location info?

Are people really comfortable with it? Or just not given in any choice in the matter and lacking any practical means of stopping them?

Houses can indeed be landmarks. Why are you equating landmarks to surveillance. That makes zero sense. No one is surveilling you through your WiFi SSID.

Except they are: Google undoubtedly uses the set of WiFi networks near you for location-based tracking on Android, even if your GPS is off.

Knowing the location of an SSID is not surveillance

You're right - knowing where something is, is more or less just creating a form of map. But knowing who is where on that map, and when, is surveillance - it's classic PI stuff.

The wiki definition seems to me to fit.

> Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing.

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