Yodasith4

Google claims engineers were unaware of Street View data breach

sinidentidades:

Google releases written testimony from engineers saying they were not aware that Street View had been designed to capture private data, including full emails, medical listings and passwords

Google has published sworn declarations from nine engineers, as the company tries to answer claims it orchestrated a cover-up of its collection of personal data from millions of internet users.

Nine engineers involved in the controversial Street View project said they were unaware it had been designed to capture private data, including full emails, medical listings and passwords.

Google published the written testimony late on Tuesday, hours after the UK information commissioner launched a fresh investigation into the data collection.

It is understood that Google publicly released the documents in response to a Freedom of Information request, not in response to the ICO investigation.

Eight of the nine Google engineers whose evidence has been published said they only became aware of the huge data capture in May 2010, when the search engine firm admitted it for the first time.

Google has been under pressure to explain the saga since April this year, when the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said that the technology was designed specifically to retrieve information from public Wi-Fi signals as Street View cars photographed peoples’ homes.

The FCC said the collection did not breach US privacy laws, but that other Google engineers – including a senior manager – knew of its data-capture technology. Google has maintained that the data was mistakenly harvested and was never intended to be used.