FTC Ends Google Street View Wi-Fi Data Collection Inquiry
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it has closed its investigation into Google's inadvertent Wi-Fi data collection.
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it has closed its investigation into Google's inadvertent Wi-Fi data collection via its Street View cars.
Google has implemented sufficient changes to its privacy policies and assured government officials that it will delete and not use the collected data, the FTC said. "Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time," David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote in a letter to Google lawyers.
FTC staff was concerned that Google did not have adequate internal policies in place to uncover glitches with the system, Vladeck said.
"[Google] did not discover that it had been collecting payload data until it responded to a request for information from a data protection authority," Vladeck wrote. "This indicates that Google's internal review processes - both prior to the initiation of the project to collect data about wireless access points and after its launch - were not adequate to discover that the software would be collecting payload data, which was not necessary to fulfill the project's business purpose."
At issue is a May admission from Google that equipment attached to its Street View cars that was traveling over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, known as payload data. At first Google said it did not know if that data included personally identifiable information, but the company admitted on Friday that it did .
When it made that announcement, Google also made several changes to its privacy policies: it appointed Alma Whitten to serve as Google's director of privacy across privacy and engineering; it promised to enhance its core privacy training for engineers and other groups; and Google said it will add a new process to its existing review system.
Given these changes, the FTC is no longer as concerned about Google's processes, Vladeck said. "Google has made assurances to the FTC that the company has not used and will not use any of the payload data collected in any Google product or service, now or in the future," he wrote. "This assurance is critical to mitigate the potential harm to consumers from the collection of payload data."
"We welcome the news that the FTC has closed its inquiry and recognized the steps we have taken to improve our internal controls. As we've said before and as we've assured the FTC, we did not want and have never used the payload data in any of our products or services," Google said in a statement.