Search engine Google seems likely to fire the bloke who wrote the wi-fi code that sniffed people's networks.

The unnamed bloke wrote the code as part of the Google Street Car software package and Google claims it should never have been there. The wi-fi sniffing software had got Google into shedloads of hotwater in the EU. The search engine claims it never wanted that data in the first place.

However that did not mean that Google did not store the data for future use. Apparently the information was completed in the UK and the question is whether or not Google did have plans to use it  before it was found out. Now it seems the poor coder will be made the sacrificial goat for Google's cock-up.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted Google "screwed up" and blamed a male software engineer for writing the rogue code behind the data collection. Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice-president of engineering and research, told the Sydney Morning Herald that an investigation was ongoing but, asked if the engineer in question would be sacked, he replied that "anything can happen in the future".