Are you suggesting that they have no choice but to completely stop locating the user as there's absolutely no way they could offer non-lane specific navigation? The vast majority of it would be identical and I'm sure they could easily and gracefully degrade to that when strictly necessary.
How much does a company need to degrade a service - at potentially great cost - to be compliant before they can claim it then would be better not to provide the service at all to customers unwilling to share data?
I am not claiming that this is where Google needs to draw the line in the sand - but there obviously is such a limit to these considerations.
Google was able to provide the service before, now they patched it out. So clearly it is not a question of ability to gracefully degrade but of willingness.
