Google is feeling rekindled heat over the private data it collected without permission in more than 30 nations.
The British Information Commissioner's Office on Monday asked to take a closer look at the evidence Google made available earlier this year, after the company admitted that cars sent to take photos for its Street View mapping service also carried Internet eavesdropping gear.
The U.K.'s request follows Canada's disclosure last week that Google, indeed, collected sensitive information during its Street View campaign, not just "fragmentary data," as the company had earlier indicated.
"Some of the captured information was very sensitive, such as a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, along with their telephone numbers and addresses," says Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's Commissioner of Privacy. "It is likely thousands of Canadians were affected."
Google's Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, had stated in a May 14 blog post that the Wi-Fi data harvested by the Google vehicles was "fragmentary " since the cars were "on the move." On Oct. 19, Canada issued an investigative summary. Three days later, Eustace amended his stance.
"A number of external regulators have inspected the data," Eustace wrote in a Friday blog post. "It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords."
Eustace listed several privacy measures Google has recently implemented. "We are mortified by what happened," he wrote, adding that Google would like to "delete this data as soon as possible."
Google spokeswoman Christine Chen says the company wants "to protect the privacy of those whose data we mistakenly collected."
Google already has deleted data harvested in Austria, Denmark, Ireland and Hong Kong, but has been unable to delete more because "many of the investigations are still ongoing," Chen says.
Privacy lawsuits and Congressional inquiries in the U.S., the re-opened British probe and potential investigations by privacy regulators in other nations make destroying more data problematic.
Intensified scrutiny of how and why Google collected this data could help explain how and why such a large, sophisticated data-collection project came to be.
"It's very likely that when the data was initially gathered, the engineers who gathered it intended to use it," says John Simpson, managing director of the non-profit Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.
