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.

A spokesman for the California-based company said Google has been handing over data to authorities in the affected countries for the past two weeks.

CNIL said it is still examining the data it received from Google on June 4. The organisation may yet seek financial or criminal penalties over the privacy breach, the organisation’s head Yann Padova said at a news conference.

Mr Padova said it remains unknown how many individuals and how many cities had their private data collected by Google.

Last month, Google acknowledged it had mistakenly collected data over public wi-fi networks in more than 30 countries.

Google says it has stopped grabbing wi-fi data from its Street View vehicles since it discovered the data collection problem last month following an inquiry by German regulators.

Police in Germany and Australia have already launched their own investigations into the matter.

German authorities have not received all the data they were hoping for from Google, said Arne Gerhards, spokesman of the Hamburg Data Securities Authority, which is in charge of the Street View case in Germany.

While the authority was able to test one of the Street View vehicles it has not had access to a specific hard drive it needs to look at, Mr Gerhards said. The authority hopes to get access to it within the next two weeks.

German consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner is planning another meeting with Google management to clear up the matter, a spokesman said.