WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that it was investigating whether Google had violated laws when it collected Wi-Fi data as part of its Street View photo project.
News of the F.C.C. investigation came just two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission halted its own inquiry into the Google project without taking action.
“Last month, Google disclosed that its Street View cars collected passwords, e-mails and other personal information wirelessly from unsuspecting people across the country,” Michele Ellison, chief of the F.C.C’s enforcement bureau, said Wednesday in a statement.
Street View is a project that Google began in 2007 to add street-level pictures to its mapping service. The images are collected by cars that use cameras to capture 360-degree views and link the images with GPS data. The project has expanded across the United States and into at least 30 other countries.
More recently the cars were also recording information about Wi-Fi networks in nearby homes and businesses, data that can be used to help mobile devices determine their locations. But Google went beyond noting the existence of such networks and recorded information that was being sent over them.
Google first disclosed, on its corporate blog, its interception of such data in May and said it was inadvertent. But in October it said on the blog that it had collected more information about Internet users than it had first thought, including, in some cases, entire e-mails and passwords.
“In light of their public disclosure, we can now confirm that the Enforcement Bureau is looking into whether these actions violate the Communications Act,” Ms. Ellison said. “As the agency charged with overseeing the public airwaves, we are committed to ensuring that the consumers affected by this breach of privacy receive a full and fair accounting.”
The F.C.C. confirmed the investigation on Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported it on its Web site. Google also issued a statement Wednesday, apologizing again for what had happened. “As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks,” Google said. “As soon as we realized what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities.
“As we assured the F.T.C., which has closed its inquiry, we did not want and have never used the payload data in any of our products and services,” Google said. “We want to delete the data as soon as possible and will continue to work with the authorities to determine the best way forward, as well as to answer their further questions and concerns.”
The F.C.C. inquiry was prompted at least in part by a complaint about Google’s actions by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group. In a May 18 letter to the commission, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the group, said that Google’s actions could have violated Section 705 of the Communications Act, which forbids the interception of radio communications without authorization, and the federal Wiretap Act.
A trade commission official said in an Oct. 27 letter that its decision to halt its inquiry had been based in part on Google’s assurances that it was improving privacy protections and its vows that it would not use any data it collected. The trade commission’s decision angered privacy advocates, who have pushed for Google to disclose how and why it collected the information.
Several European countries have investigated or are investigating Google’s actions.
(source:nytimes.com)
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