FTC Drops Google Wi-Fi Snooping Inquiry

Some fuss, but no muss. The Federal Trade Commission has ended its investigation into Google's collection of consumer data for its Street View service.

The regulators said that Google has since improved its privacy controls and did not plan to fine the company.

"This assurance is critical to mitigate the potential harm to consumers from the collection of payload data," the FTC said in a statement today. "Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time."

The FTC said it had received assurances from Google that it "has not used and will not use any of the payload data collected in any Google product or service, now or in the future."

Google welcomed the FTC decision, adding that "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."

Last spring, Google said that a programming error had caused its Street View cars to intercept data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. And last week, Google acknowledged that some e-mail messages and passwords had also been collected. Google said that most of the data was "fragmentary," and that it planned to delete the information "as soon as possible."