Google caught in massive acquisition of private info in the UK

With headlines noting "Web giant deliberately stole information but executives 'covered it up' for years" and "Emails, texts, photos and documents taken from wi-fi networks," it seems that the UK may finally be moving to punish Google for misleading countries on its eavesdropping on private citizens. From the UK Daily Mail:

Google is facing an inquiry into claims that it deliberately harvested information from millions of UK home computers. The Information Commissioner data protection watchdog is expected to examine the work of the internet giant’s Street View cars. They downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road. It is two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was a ‘mistake’. Now the full scale of its activities has emerged amid accusations of a cover-up after US regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars trawled the country but did nothing. . . . Last month a report by the US media regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revealed that the Google programmer who wrote the Street View software repeatedly warned that it collected personal data, and called for a legal and privacy review. . . . The report by the FCC attacked Google for inadequate oversight of Street View, and claimed it was planning to use the data collected for other internal projects. . . . .