[extra88]

Thanks, I hadn't seen (or don't recall) those details.

Even that story portrays the payload collection as basically one "rogue" engineer's intention, not a part of a business or project plan. While other engineers accessed the collected payload data later, they may have reasonably assumed that if they had it, someone had ok'd it.

So rather than a coding error, it was an organizational failure to oversee the engineers' work, the FCC's report says as much.

[josefx]

The problem is that they followed the classic of denying everything they could until evidence against it turned up:

1. we didn't do it

2. we did it by accident in small cases

3. we did it by accident in worse cases

4. we did it intentionally but one guy was responsible

5. we did it but it was just one rouge dev. team

Add to that the unredacted report noting that Google kept delaying and hindering the investigation and it is rather clear that "6. we did it and management was neck deep into it" is more likely than not.