Google hit by $7m Street View fine for harvesting data

Google has agreed to pay a record $7 million fine after its Street View cars collected passwords and other personal data from home Wi-Fi networks.

Google said the incident was a mistake and that the collected data was not used by the web giant.

The company said the data, collected between 2008 and 2010 across the US, was taken due a piece of experimental computer code included in the Street View mapping cars’ software.

In agreeing the settlement with 38 US states, Google did not acknowledge that it had broken any laws, but made a so-called “assurance of voluntary compliance”.

The $7m (£4.7m) fine, which will be split among the states involved in the investigation, represents a tiny fraction of Google's roughly $50.2 billion revenue and $10.7bn net income in 2012.

Marc Rotenberg, of the non-profit privacy advocacy group the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that the fine represents the largest in US history for violations of internet privacy.