"Google fined $25000 for stalling data collection investigation"

Google has been fined $25000 for obstructing an investigation into its “Street View” online mapping service gathering data from private wireless hotspots. However a larger inquiry involving Internet privacy issues has been dropped.

According to a report in the New York Times,

the investigation, described in an interim report, was left unresolved because a critical participant, the Google engineer in charge of the project, cited his Fifth Amendment right and declined to talk. It is unclear who else at Google might have known about the data gathering, or when they might have known.

Google maintains that the data gathering was unauthorized, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, but the engineer is maintaining that other people at the company knew about it.

What did Google do with personal data it 'inadvertently' collected from users? AP

The investigation into Google was launched by the US Federal Communication Commission, after it Google confessed that Google announced that Street View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries had ‘inadvertently’ gathered data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems.

Information sucked up by the passing Street View cars included passwords, emails, and other data that was being transmitted wirelessly over unprotected routers, according to the FCC. Google first said it had not

collected personal data. Then it said such data was in fragments. Then it conceded there were things like entire e-mails.

The FCC contended that Google delayed the investigation by ignoring requests for internal information such as emails related to Street View data collection and the names of employees who authorized or reviewed it.

“For many months, Google deliberately impeded and delayed the bureau’s investigation by failing to respond to requests for material information,” FCC enforcement bureau chief Michele Ellison said in a written report.

The NYT report says however that there are still many unanswered questions on as to what Google was doing with the personal information it was collecting. It quotes Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center as saying, “I appreciate that the F.C.C. sanctioned Google for not cooperating in the investigation, but the much bigger problem is the pervasive and covert surveillance of Internet users that Google undertook over a three-year period.”

It also quoted J. Trevor Hughes, president of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, as saying the “Google case represented what happened when technical employees of technology companies made “innocent” decisions about collecting data that could infuriate consumers and in turn invite regulatory inquiry.”