While Google (News - Alert) will go to its corporate grave claiming the data the company intercepted using its Google Street View cars was collected by accident, the company continues to take heat from various entities.

The Internet giant has been hit by various government officials and agencies over the last few weeks, as the company has seen increasedscrutiny on an issue it had hoped had gone away. 

Google recently received a $25,000 finefrom the FCC (News - Alert) for impeding that United States’ agency’s investigation into the matter and it appears the company will get more attention from European regulators after one employee made comments that raised eyebrows.

The comments in question came when one of the company’s programmers supposedly contradicted Google’s public comments that the data collection had indeed been by mistake. The revelation that Google’s street view cars were doing anything untoward were first discovered in Germany, and led to investigations in other European countries and eventually the United States. 

Most of the resulting investigations were settled after the Internet giant apologized and claimed the recording of personal information the company had no right to have was collected by accident by an overzealous programmer. 

Now a newreport from the FCC shows that the programmer had told his higher ups in 2007 that the Street View program would collect data from unprotected Wi-Fi routers.

This revelation, as well as the fact that the programmer spelled out the problem in a report that his bosses claim they never read, has led to reopening the investigation. 

“Of course this will have a big impact,” said Johannes Caspar, the data protection commissioner for Hamburg, Germany. “This is apparently a totally different situation than what we thought initially. We had been told that it was a simple mistake, as the company had told us. But now, we are learning that this wasn’t a mistake and that people within the company knew this information was being collected. That puts it in a totally different light.”

It does not appear that Germany will be the only European country to reopen an investigation. Authorities in Great Britain and France have said they will review the report by the FCC and determine whether they need to begin looking harder at Google over this situation.