June 8th, 2010 
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Three US lawmakers have expressed concerns tat Google Inc may have violated U.S. privacy laws and want to know much of personal data was collected by the company by its project to photograph streets across the country and how this data will be used.
California Republican Rep. Joe Barton, California Democrat Henry Waxman and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey said in a letter to Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, said Google collected more than 600 gigabytes of data through Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries.
From in.news.yahoo.com:
“We are concerned that Google did not disclose until long after the fact that consumers’ Internet use was being recorded, analyzed and perhaps profiled,” the lawmakers wrote. “We are concerned about the completeness and accuracy of Google’s public explanations about this matter.”
“This was a mistake,” Google spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said in an email. “Google did nothing illegal and we look forward to answering questions from these congressional leaders.”
Google has sent fleets of cars around the world for several years to take panoramic pictures of streets. People using Google’s online atlas for locations and directions in many cases can look at photographs collected by the Street View project and classified by address.
Google uses a combination of data from Wi-Fi, GPS and cell phone towers to determine where smartphone users are so they can be given information based on a specific location.
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that his agency will be looking into the matter but did not communicated anything confirming is this was a formal investigation.
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