Google characterized Street View's "privacy violations" as a "mistake" made by a single engineer working on an "experimental" project, whose code had inadvertently made it into Street View's software. The firm refused to release the identity of the mystery engineer and insisted that the project's leaders were unaware of the data capture and "had no intention" of using those data. As Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times, "We screwed up," noting that the engineer in question would face an internal investigation for his clear "violation" of Google's policies. Unbowed, Schmidt insisted on the validity of Google's mission to index all the world's information.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 455