Google Responds to New British Investigation of Street View What did Google know about the data-scooping its Google Street View cars did, and when did Google know it? That seems to be at the heart of a newly reopened investigation by British data authorities, their third try at getting to the bottom of this controversial episode. The Information Commissioner's Office also seems to suspect Google of not being quite forthright with its officials earlier, which might explain the more aggressive stance this time around. Google has now responded to the I.C.O."s questions via a letter from its chief privacy counsel, which has been posted in full by The Telegraph. Google says it is "surprised" to find itself confronting another investigation and offers one of its most sustained defenses yet. But there doesn't seem to be much common ground yet even over the basic chronology. Take, for instance, the question of just how the data collection - a secret offshoot of the Street View mapping effort that gathered passwords, messages and the like from households using unencrypted Wi-Fi networks - came to light in the first place. By most accounts, suspicious European data protection authorities deduced the truth bit by bit in the spring of 2010 even as the company asserted there was nothing going on. But Google implies it blew the whistle on itself. "As soon as we realised what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in his letter this week. Also at issue is why the regulators saw so little when they first looked at a sample of the so-called payload data provided by Google - a sample that influenced the I.C.O."s decision to end a previous investigation. Last week, the I.C.O. wondered if the sample had been "preprepared." Google says it wasn't, and that except for making the data readable by humans, it was not touched. But it added that it couldn't really describe what data was secretly collected in Britain because it had all been destroyed. As for the question of who at the company knew about the secret data collection besides the engineer who designed the project, the company said, as it had in the past, "No project leader asked for or wanted the collection of payload data (and as noted many times, the proof is that payload data was not used in any product or service)." This is a cornerstone of the Google defense - that the data never made it into a product - so Google is in the clear. But if the regulators had not uncovered the data collection, prompting worldwide outrage and making Google back off, would that have remained true? Why else collect data if not to use it somehow? The Federal Communications Commission, in its report on the project this spring, was clear on this point. It concluded that "the record shows" that the engineer in charge of the project "intended to collect, store and review" the data "for possible use in other Google products." Indeed, the engineer had already reviewed the data at least once to identify frequently visited Web sites. Google initially maintained that the engineer had acted independently, but the F.C.C. said others at the company were, in theory at least, informed. In its letter, Google noted that the F.C.C. report "makes much of the fact that the engineer sent the design document by e-mail to the Street View team" and that the document included "an ancillary reference to the collection of "user traffic patterns."" But the team, the company said, was not paying attention - and perhaps was not very sharp, either: "Google was unable to identify anyone who read the document, let alone who would have read the technical document in detail and understood the reference."