Google Releases FCC Report On Street View Probe

An anonymous reader writes with news that Google has released the full report of the FCC investigation into the incident in which its Street View cars collected personal data while mapping Wi-Fi networks. They are putting responsibility for the data gathering on a 'rogue engineer' who wrote the code for it without direction from management. "Those working on Street View told the FCC they had no knowledge that the payload data was being collected. Managers of the Street View program said they did not read the October 2006 document [written by the engineer that detailed his work]. A different engineer remembered receiving the document but did not recall any reference to the collection of payload data. An engineer who worked closely with the engineer in question on the project in 2007, reviewing all of the codes line by line for bugs, says he did not notice that the software was designed to capture payload data. A senior manager said he preapproved the document before it was written."

Comments

what about the rest of the life cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

was anyone assigned to validate requirements against functionality? compliance? export control? 3rd party software integration copyright and license? was any due diligence done other than to review for technical bugs?

Re:what about the rest of the life cycle?

[Tharsman]

I got to say, it sounds extremely odd that there were no more eyes. Google is a company that has a price tag on how much every signle web search executed by a user cost them, in energy and equipment degradation. They have specially manufactured cpus that can run hot so they can conserve as much heat as they can. ... but in all those years, even in the initial test run... no one noticed the cars where filling their hard-drives WAY too fast?

This takes me back about 7 years ago in a contract involving 3 parties. Client, contractor and a sub-contractor. In a meeting, the usually incompetent IT manager employed by the client to run their data center, asks our sub-contractor "why is the database growing at a rate of 1GB per day?" The sub-contractor was clueless and we shocked. Sure, we perhaps should had noticed.... (BTW, reason for the growth: zero normalization. I kid you not, these guys had absolutely no normalized tables at all, and nearly every field indexed.)

My point is: unexpected bursts in data storage are too easy to notice, because the first time hard drives fill up and windows (or whatever OS they use) shouts for air... well... some one will notice.

But these are not morons... these are Google engineers... the ones that have quantified the cost of a search to the atomic level. I'm sure more than just an unnamed "rogue engineer" was very aware of this.

Management's justifications

[Anonymous Coward]

They are putting responsibility for the data gathering on a 'rogue engineer' who wrote the code for it without direction from management.

An engineer who worked closely with the engineer in question on the project in 2007, reviewing all of the codes line by line for bugs, says he did not notice that the software was designed to capture payload data. A senior manager said he preapproved the document before it was written."

Isn't interesting in Corporate America, when things go great, it's management's brilliance? And when things go bad, it's a rogue employee?

I'd really like to know management's justification for their obscenely high compensation, for one thing.

Here's another thing while I'm ranting:That's one of the big differences between managing and leading.

Leader: it's MY fault and I'll take care of it.

Manager: it's someone elses fault. You go take care of it.