Over the weekend, Google released an updated version of a previously heavily redacted Federal Communication Commission (FCC) document that now reveals startling details about the company’s Street View project.
The new information indicates that, contrary to what the company had maintained, there were several employees and at least one senior manager who knew of the data gathering occurring within the Street View project.
The passages make frequent reference to an unnamed programmer, dubbed “Engineer Doe,” who was intimately involved in developing the data collection tool for Street View. The document states that, in response to the FCC’s letter of inquiry (LOI), “Google made clear for the first time that Engineer Doe’s software was deliberately written to capture payload data.” And, according to the document, the engineer’s software tool “would collect payload data that Engineer Doe thought might prove useful for other Google services.”