Google Admits To Violating Your Privacy With Its Street View Cars

Flickr/Craig Baerwaldt

Google has agreed to pay a $7 million fine to 38 states and the District of Columbia to settle a three-year-long privacy investigation involving its Street View cars, David Streitfeld of The New York Times reports.

Between 2008 and 2010, Google's Street View cars collected passwords and other private information from home wireless networks.

But Google says the incident was a mistake, citing an experimental piece of computer code in the cars' software that accidentally collected users' private information.

As part of the settlement, Google has to educate its employees about user privacy and sponsor a nationwide campaign about protecting yourself on wireless networks. It also must destroy all of the data it collected.

For a company like Google $7 million is less than pocket change. It's nothing.