Public SSIDs, MAC addresses, and locations are in an evolving grey area (to my knowledge, not an attorney) but they didn't do that.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.