When "We screwed up" means "we got found out"

Google's Sergey Brin at a press conference, as reported by Search Engine Land

At a press briefing at the Google I/O developers conference today, Google cofounder Sergey Brin didn’t mince words about his company’s accidental collection of wifi data. “We screwed up,” he said.

He was asked about the incident, where last week Google admitted it accidentally gathered data from private wifi networks around the world over the past three years.

“We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Brin said.

He went on to say that while Google did have internal contols in place, the mistake “obviously” meant more needed to be done, and that more tools would be put in place.

“Trust is very important to us, and we’re going to do everything we can to preserve it,” he said.

"Accidentally" gathering data for 3 years? These are not dumb people, one assumes that after a few weeks it was clear what was happening and they could have decided to stop. Or even not have had WiFi sniffers in the cars in the first place. Or turned them off so they didn't pull data off people's WiFi. Or told people when they knew and immediately deleted that data. Thats's the sort of thing a "don't be Evil" company would do, you'd of thought.

No, we have to wait 3 years before the news comes out, by accident, it is initially denied, and then only when the various regulatory agencies get involved do they promise to delete it. I think that should be prevented, as I'd be fascinated to see what they were up to.