Google agrees to pay $25,000 fine to put FCC investigation ‘behind it’

Earlier this month Google was hit with a $25,000 fine from the FCC for impeding an investigation into whether or not the data collected during its Street View project violated user privacy. Now the company has agreed to pay the fine “in order to put this investigation behind it.” The FCC’s complaint centered on a specific Google engineer responsible for coding the Street View project software, who reportedly refused to answer questions during the investigation, which the FCC claims left “significant factual questions” unanswered. While Google says that it paid the fine as a way of closing the investigation for good, the FCC looks at it a different way. “In promising to pay the bureau’s penalty, the company has rightly admitted wrongdoing,” spokeswoman Tammy Sun said. Despite the fine, the FCC was unable to find sufficient evidence in the Street View investigation to take further legal action.