European Phoenix -- Google said that a rogue employee was responsible for a privacy breach, and the higher-ups didn’t know. Then it said that the employee may have notified his manager, but the manager didn’t read what he wrote. Now, suddenly, it seems that maybe it wasn’t one rogue after all. 

Sound familiar? 

Just a few months after News Corp. faced its headline-grabbing, newspaper-shuttering phone-hacking scandal, the report on data-privacy problems with Google’s Street View has many familiar echoes. 

Street View was Google’s project in the United States and Europe in which it sent out special camera-equipped cars that were only supposed to be snapping pictures for Google Maps and Google Earth. But the company later admitted that, between May 2007 and May 2010, its crews recorded e-mail, passwords, and other digital data from unprotected wireless networks in the areas they visited. 

It was an accident, Google claimed when the truth had begun to emerge. The company has never done anything with the data, and it was all caused by one rogue engineer, Google insisted. 

Now that story seems to have fallen apart. 

On April 13 the Federal Communications Commission fined Google $25,000 and released a 25-page report about the incident, which concluded that Google had not violated any U.S. laws. But the report was also heavily redacted—at Google’s insistence. 

On April 27, after a number of organizations had filed public record requests for an unredacted version, the company relented and released a copy [PDF] to The Los Angeles Times, with only names of individuals blacked out. 

Google spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker e-mailed the Times an explanation: “We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals,” she wrote. “While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us.”

Still, the full version tells a different story than the one Google had presented. In it, Google acknowledged that the unnamed engineer—called Engineer Doe in the FCC report—deliberately wrote code designed to capture the wi-fi data (referred to as “payload data”), the report says. And it was even written into his initial design document. 

But—shades of News Corp. scion James Murdoch—managers who worked on the project claimed they failed to read the document. And going one better: “A senior manager of Street View said he ‘pre-approved’ the design document before it was written.”

That didn’t take the Googlers off the hook, however. Far from being a lone wolf, Engineer Doe’s e-mail proved that he informed colleagues on at least two occasions that Street View was collecting this data. And he also sent an e-mail to a “senior manager of the Street View project recounting a conversation they had concerning Engineer Doe’s analysis of the payload data,” the report said.

There were, of course, many differences between Street View and News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal. Most starkly, a reporter and a private detective have already served time in a U.K. prison in the hacking scandal. At this point, no one has been penalized in the U.S. for Street View. 

One further difference between Google's and News Corp.’s problems involved in-house lawyers. Tom Crone, News Corp.’s former lawyer, testified that he told James Murdoch that phone hacking at the company wasn’t limited to the one reporter who was prosecuted. Crone backed up his statement with an e-mail he sent to James Murdoch, who said that he hadn’t read it. 

In Google’s case, the in-house lawyer appears midway through the FCC report, but he’s a ship passing in the night. He’s on the to-do list in Engineer Doe’s design document: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel,” the engineer reminded himself. Unfortunately, according to the FCC report, “that never occurred.”