It's convenient for the owner of the Android phone, but the wifi password is not necessarily theirs to give away. That's the problem. It's not because your friends and family have given you their wifi password that they intended to give that password to Google as well. You're trading their security for your convenience.

It's certainly a problem. I don't think Google will, or indeed should, do anything about it though.

I'd like to see routers using the passphrase to generate a long lived authentication token. "Good netizens", as the phrase goes, could ensure their routers / client devices didn't store passphrases without inconveniencing the end user.

great observation; it leads to a possible new feature for home wifi routers such as "guest" passwords or temporary passwords that expire (yes, I see that's redundant).

you really think its normal that google has direct access to various different PERSONAL passwords. I don't. 99% of the users don't even realize this is being done.

Then people go crazy about the NSA having the same access.. you guys don't make the link or ... ?