France tackles Google over wi-fi breaches

France has become the latest country to hold Google to account over a privacy breach that saw the search engine giant mistakenly gather and store data over public wi-fi networks in more than 30 countries.

The French independent privacy watchdog CNIL said that following its complaint, Google had handed over copies of emails, browsing history, banking details and other fragments of data sucked up by Google technicians cruising French streets photographing neighbourhoods for the website’s Street View mapping feature.