How do you do that by accident? Somebody had to design, implement, and test a feature to sniff and store data off wireless networks.

The goal was just to sniff the wifi APs MAC to pair it with a GPS location for wifi location lookups, not to store the entirety of the packet.

As the story goes, the code [library] was written for another, past project at Google and a work in progress; the car project extended or implemented it without looking under the covers.

You are very naive if you think that Google does something by mistake (that also happens to fit well into their Big Black Hole of Information).

I work for Google, and I can assure you, we do 100,000 things by mistake every day.

In your narrative, would Google have self-reported this intrusion? Because, they didn't have to, and they did it anyway.

You are very paranoid if you think a corporation with thousands of employees never makes mistakes.

First of all, the public should do something about their privacy, if they are concerned about their privacy. Parents are teaching their children that anything they do on the internet is never private.

Nonetheless, I doubt I'm naive to believe engineers are not always making mistakes. The trick is always in admitting mistake, learning from them, and fixing the future. In this case, Google acknowledged the -- lawful -- slip in privacy encroachments and assigned a privacy director to oversee engineering and product management efforts. Every Google product now maintains a privacy-design document.

Given some of the other revelations, is it too tinfoil-hat to entertain the notion that Google were compelled to make the aforementioned slip-up?

Almost certainly it is, but would I be surprised if it were true? Would anyone be?

I'd be willing to bet the NSA had a good browse of the resulting data, either way.