A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report claimed that a Google engineer wrote a computer program which facilitated collection of personal information from home Wi-Fi networks.
The report also suggested that the engineer told least two other Google employees about it.
Google was fined $25,000 by the FCC for impeding its investigation into the matter, in which the company's Street View cars collected the Wi-Fi data over several years while crisscrossing the globe taking panoramic pictures of streets.
Engineer Doe intended to collect, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects.
According to the Google-released version of the report, the company told the FCC it did not initially know about software that would gather personal data -- known as "payload data."
"Engineer Doe specifically told two engineers working on the project, including a senior manager, about collecting payload data," the agency said in the report. "Engineer Doe intended to collect, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects.
"Nevertheless, managers of the Street View project and other Google employees who worked on Street View have uniformly asserted in declarations and interviews" that they did not know about it, the FCC report said.
The FCC had originally redacted this information when it released its report two weeks ago. Google released a full version of the report with only names and telephone numbers blacked out.
"We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals," the company said in a statement e-mailed to Reuters in New York.
"While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC's conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us."
