Wifi SSID triangulation is incredibly common & is one of the primary ways phones are able to so reliably & quickly get a fine location, especially indoors.
Apple is also collecting & phoning home all SSIDs with a GPS location that they come across, for example. So is Mozilla for that matter, and Mozilla also uses the same _nomap suffix as Google does ( https://location.services.mozilla.com/optout ). It's how browsers on laptops are able to get a location, which is also true on again both Apple & Microsoft devices as well.
So no, Google can't just opt to not do this at all. Not if they want to be competitive. The entire ecosystem could collectively decide to not build an SSID location database at all, but since SSIDs are not identifying this is going to be a struggle to justify.
No one does triangulation. They do trilateration, which is the version of finding things that uses circles (signal strength is proportional to distance).
Apple is also collecting & phoning home all SSIDs with a GPS location that they come across, for example. So is Mozilla for that matter, and Mozilla also uses the same _nomap suffix as Google does ( https://location.services.mozilla.com/optout ). It's how browsers on laptops are able to get a location, which is also true on again both Apple & Microsoft devices as well.
So no, Google can't just opt to not do this at all. Not if they want to be competitive. The entire ecosystem could collectively decide to not build an SSID location database at all, but since SSIDs are not identifying this is going to be a struggle to justify.