Google may sack 'rogue' Wi-Fi code writer

The head of Google's engineers worldwide says he could still sack the rogue engineer blamed for the recent Wi-Fi privacy debacle, while implying politicians were overreacting for political gain.

Google could face a criminal investigation in New Zealand after it admitted to hoovering up 600GB of data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries while taking photographs for its Street View mapping service.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted Google "screwed up" and blamed a male software engineer for writing the rogue code behind the data collection.

Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice-president of engineering and research, said in an interview with this website today that an investigation was ongoing but, asked if the engineer in question would be sacked, he replied that "anything can happen in the future".

"There's obviously an internal investigation that's going on about what happened, what the issues are," he said.

"We've got internal and external reviews on the code, how it was written, all the details of it. Those investigations are ongoing.

"This was a mistake and as a result we're treating it like a mistake."

Other countries, including Germany, France and Spain, have launched their own investigations into the matter and criminal charges are being considered.

Asked whether politicians were overreacting to the issue for political gain, Eustace suggested they were but said the company was taking the matter seriously.

"We're getting basically small snippets of traffic only on open networks ... Chances are a single user with a car being driven by for 0.2 tenths of a second every two years is not likely to expose a lot of data," he said.

"There have been some good articles that have tried to I think put a more realistic description [of the issue] out there ... but politics of situations are always politics of situations."

Asher Moses travelled to Tokyo as a guest of Google.

- © Fairfax NZ News