This is a pretty insane conspiracy theory considering people happily give Google their CC (Google pay), emails (Gmail), physical address (maps), password (chrome), wifi info (android).
It was just a mistake in a setting. They were accidentally capturing random packets, and of course you collect enough random packets and they will contain every conceivable type of data. It wasn't used for anything. It's not a conspiracy. They did street view to do street view, which is why they kept doing it for 12 years (and counting) after the packet collection was fixed.
The “insane conspiracy theory” is not that an ad network did everything it could to scrape more data for ads, lol. The insane conspiracy theory is that the ad network decided to photograph people’s property because it’s a nice thing to do.
There’s obviously all sorts of data that wardriving can pick up that none of those services could (even if they existed at the time, which most didn’t). And obviously you or I have no clue what the data was used for. My guess is that, being a business, they used it for their core business, and your guess is that they spent exorbitant amounts of money to accumulate their pot of gold for… well no gosh darn reason.
Now that Android exists, Google has pretty good reason to continue investing in mapping. But let’s keep in mind that Android also only exists to power the revenue-generating part of the business (ads). This isn’t a critique of Google, this is how businesses work.
It was just a mistake in a setting. They were accidentally capturing random packets, and of course you collect enough random packets and they will contain every conceivable type of data. It wasn't used for anything. It's not a conspiracy. They did street view to do street view, which is why they kept doing it for 12 years (and counting) after the packet collection was fixed.