Claims made that Google knew about capability to gather data via Street View cars

An investigation into Google's ability to gather unsecured WiFi data via its Street View cars has found that several employees knew of this capability.

According to Reuters, an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission found that the Google engineer who wrote the software told two colleagues and a senior manager about it. The report states: “Engineer Doe intended to gather, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects.” This comes despite the company's insistence that it failed to initially find out about the potential.

Google was investigated over the gathering of information by its cars when photographing for its Street View service by information and privacy commissioners globally. In May 2010, it apologised for collecting the information, saying it was 'clear that we've got been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, though we never used that data in any Google products'.

In the united kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) made a decision that Google had breached the knowledge Protection Act over Street View, with information commissioner Christopher Graham then saying that Google had passed an audit but ordered it to make privacy improvements on all of its products.

In an announcement issued two years ago, Alan Eustace, senior vice chairman of engineering and research at Google, said: “In 2006 an engineer engaged on an experimental WiFi project wrote a bit of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to gather basic WiFi network data similar to SSID information and Mac addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code of their software-although the project leaders didn't wish, and had no intention of using, payload data.

“As soon as we became conscious of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the information on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We wish to delete this information once possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators within the relevant countries about easy methods to quickly take away it.”

An article by the hot York Times named an engineer and said that his LinkedIn page lists his occupation as “hacker” and under the class called “Specialities,” his entry reads, “I know greater than i would like to about WiFi.”

In a press release to Reuters, Google said: “While we disagree with a few of the statements made within the document, we accept as true with the FCC's conclusion that we didn't break the law. We are hoping that we will now put this matter behind us."