A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following a 17-month investigation, reveals that, contrary to what Google’s position had been all this time, Google actually knew that their Street View drive-bys were sucking down people’s personal data through any open wifi routers that the Street View van encountered. And not just a little bit – but for nearly three years, between 2007 and 2010. Private data that was harvested from individuals includes email (the full text of!), passwords, sites visited, and other sensitive information. Until now Google had always maintained that they didn’t realize it was happening, and that it was an accident wraught by a single engineer at Google. Turns out that supervisors knew all along that it was going on. While the FCC concludes that Google did not break any laws, there was a heck of a lot of invasion of privacy going on, and, in addition, Google was slapped with a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation.

More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.