I'm not a huge personal specialist in this, but I understood that the initial operation was to do a street mapping. Then they were interested in picking up Wi-Fi transmission points for the development of other services, geo-location services. But they didn't understand--because of internal, I'd say, organizational problems--that in doing that they also got the personal information that was unencrypted and not password-protected.
On October 19th, 2010. See this statement in context.