By News.com.au
Google is facing an investigation into claims its Street View cars deliberately collected data from millions of residents and the company covered it up, reports said today.
The tech giant has already admitted to stealing fragments of personal data from unprotected wi-fi networks as the cars photographed streets of the UK, The Daily Mail reports.
The data included emails, text and chat messages, passwords, photos, documents and social network posts with Google saying it had been a “mistake”.
But a report by the US media regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed the Google programmer who wrote the software had warned as early as 2007 the cars would be collecting the data.
The programmer, 41-year-old Marius Milner, originally from East Sussex, had wanted a legal and privacy review, the FCC heard.
A spokesperson for the ICO told The Daily Mail it would be examining the FCC report further but Google had provided a formal undertaking in 2010 about their future conduct when the data collection was revealed.
“This included a provision for the ICO to audit Google’s privacy practices,” the spokesperson said. “The audit was published in August 2011 and we will be following up on it later this year, to ensure our recommendations have been put in place.”
Google spokesman Anthony House said the company had “always been clear that the leaders of this project did not want or intend to use this payload data”.
“Indeed Google never used it in any of our products or services,” Mr House said. “Both the Department of Justice and the FCC have looked into this closely – including reviewing the internal correspondence – and both found no violation of law.”