The FTC Ends Google Street View WiFi Investigation

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is ending its investigation over Google's Street View WiFi fiasco, the agency said in a public letter addressed to Google.

In the letter, the FTC recognized Google's promise to revise its internal policies concerning privacy and data collection and decided to end investigations based on that promise.

"[T]he company did not discover that it had been collecting payload data until it responded to a request for information from a data protection authority," the letter [PDF] signed by FTC's David Vladeck, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, read.

"This indicates that Google's internal review processes... were not adequate to discover that the software would be collecting payload data, which was not necessary to fulfill the project's business purpose," he writes.

The main concerns of the FTC, as expressed in the letter, were that the company did not have the proper policies for preventing something like this from happening.

The FTC gave no indication that it suspected malicious intentions from the company concerning the data collection.

The FTC had been investigating the matter after Google revealed that it had been collecting data from public WiFi connections with its Street View cars since the program launched.

This went on unnoticed for three years until a request from data protection authorities in Germany prompted Google to review the Street View WiFi software.

This review revealed that the software also collected so-called payload data from wireless networks, something that Google says was unintentional.

Last week, Google announced that it has completely revised its internal policies and that it has instituted several measures to ensure that this type of thing doesn't happen in the future.

"[W]e note that Google has recently announced improvements to its internal processes to address some of the concerns raised above," the letter recognized.

Google also promised to delete the payload data as soon as possible, after the various data protection and law-enforcement agencies in the countries affected gave the go-ahead.

Google said that it hasn't used the payload data in any way and that it had no intention of doing so. "Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time," the letter concluded. Google is still under investigation in other parts of the world.