The Telegraph | May 28, 2012

GOOGLE is facing an investigation into claims its Street View cars deliberately collected data from millions of residents and the company covered it up, reports said today.

The tech giant has already admitted to stealing fragments of personal data from unprotected wi-fi networks as the cars photographed streets of the UK, The Daily Mail reports.

The data included emails, text and chat messages, passwords, photos, documents and social network posts with Google saying it had been a “mistake”.

But a report by the US media regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed the Google programmer who wrote the software had warned as early as 2007 the cars would be collecting the data.

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