Google Street View cars, in addition to snagging snapshots of drug dealers and hilarious falling people, have also scooped up Internet communications from millions of unsuspecting households. This included "complete e-mail messages, instant messages, chat sessions, conversations between lovers, and Web addresses revealing sexual orientation, information that could be linked to specific street addresses," the Times reports. And the FCC has determined that it was all legal.

The "payload data" collection has prompted investigations in the U.S. and abroad, and revealed that Google either lied about the data mining, or honestly didn't know about it. As rumors swirled in April of 2010, Google insisted "it does not collect or store payload data." Two weeks later, Google reversed itself, saying, "It’s now clear we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data." Google insists it did not look at the data or use it for anything, and promised to delete all of it once the FCC investigation ended.

Over the weekend, the FCC announced it was fining Google $25,000, but not for collecting all that data, mind you—that's perfectly legal, because The Wiretap Act says it is “not unlawful to” intercept unencrypted communication. The FCC instead fined Google for impeding its investigation. The company had refused to turn over relevant employees' email because it "would be a time-consuming and burdensome task," and the main architect of the Street View project has refused to testify, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

According to the FCC report [see below], a French data privacy regulator examined the data that Google collected and found e-mails between married people trying to cheat on their spouses, including names, e-mail addresses and street addresses. The Times reports that "people, mostly in Europe, were furious" about the data mining. Oh, those Europeans and their quaint ideas about privacy. How do they expect Google to refine its Google Eyeball Implant features without this personal info? Now this $25K FCC fine is probably going to hobble Google's R&D—after all, that's 0.00083% of the $2.89 billion Google netted in the first quarter of 2012.