European privacy police say Google "duped" them over Street View

In light of the recent Federal Communications Commission report on Google outlining the fact that the company had deliberately captured people's Wi-Fi payload data with its roaming Street View cars, European privacy regulators now say that they feel misled by Google.

"Well, deceived is a big word—maybe somewhat duped," wrote Ulrich Kühn, a spokesperson for the Hamburg data protection authority, in an e-mail to Ars. The Hamburg DPA has led the investigation in Germany, since Google's German corporate headquarters are located there. "Google always admitted just as much as they were forced to by hard evidence," Kühn added. Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the European privacy panel and the chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, said that many of his colleagues "feel misled by Google," adding that Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, spoke about the incident in the Netherlands back in 2010. "At this hearing, Peter Fleischer made it pretty clear in his oral statement and in writing that it was the mistake of one single guy working at Google who had made a stupid mistake," Mr. Kohnstamm said. "But apparently, it wasn’t a mistake at all."