Google staff knew about personal data stealing, report finds

Uh oh – Google’s in trouble again

Remember the public outrage when Google “accidentally” collected personal data from people’s home WiFi networks via antennae on its Streetview cars? Now the engineer who created the programme that enabled that is saying at least two of his colleagues knew what was going on too.

The uncomfortable allegation comes out of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation’s report, released voluntarily by Google. “Engineer Doe [who wrote the programme] specifically told two engineers working on the project, including a senior manager, about collecting payload data,” the report said.

“Engineer Doe intended to collect, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects.” Data was collected between 2008 and 2010.

Google was ruled not to have broken the law by the FCC in early April, but was fined $25,000 for impeding the investigation.

Google said: “While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law.”

Google also said it wanted to “put the matter behind us”. I’ll bet!