Google Staff Knew Of Street View Wi-Fi Snooping Code
A handful of Google workers knew of code, but tech giant says more senior management were unaware
The Google engineer who designed code that soaked up personal data from Wi-Fi connections during the company’s Street View rounds told other employees about what he was doing.
The worker told other engineers and at least one senior manager, but the code was still allowed to run and scoop up data for another two years, according to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report. Yet the Mountain View giant has claimed more senior management were left in the dark. Google released the full FCC report, after the regulatory body released a heavily-redacted version of the findings earlier this month.
Catastrophic code?
Google was fined $25,000 by the FCC this April over the Street View situation, which caused plenty of trouble for the tech giant. The company escaped a fine in the UK, but has been under scrutiny across the globe for its actions.
In 2010, the company said it had mistakenly taken data, which included contents of some emails and web browsing history. “In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data,” Google said in a blog post at the time.
“A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software – although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”
The FCC report said the engineer designed to program to collect information. “Engineer Doe intended to collect, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects,” the FCC report read.
Google said it released the full report as it wanted to put the matter behind it.
“We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals,” the company 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.”
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