14 DAY TRIAL // Google has received its first financial penalty for its Street View WiFi mishap. The French privacy regulator, CNIL, awarded Google with the maximum fine it could impose, €100,000 almost $142,000. It is the first time the agency has had to do this. What's more, CNIL criticized Google for its lack of cooperation during the investigation.
It's getting close to a year now since Google's troubles with Street View started. After it revealed that it had, inadvertently it says, collected private WiFi data from open networks, may of the countries involved started investigations.
So far though, while it was found guilty of breaching privacy and data protection laws and regulations in several countries, it hasn't been awarded a monetary penalty.
"They were not always willing to co-operate with us, they didn't give us all the information we asked for, like the source code of all devices in the Google cars," Yann Padova, CNIL's executive director said. "They were not always very transparent."
It is the first time CNIL has had to use the maximum penalty it can award a company. Google has two months to contest the fine. The company has not said whether it intends to do so.
Google again apologized for the incident. It previously said it would delete all of the collected data, once it got the go ahead from the countries involved.
"As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted wi-fi networks," Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said in a statement.
Last year, Google revealed that its Street View cars, which were equipped with WiFi scanning equipment, mistakenly collected payload data from the networks along with identification data which they were supposed to capture.
Among the data, analysis later revealed, there was sensitive material such as entire emails and passwords. Several investigations are still ongoing.