Google has deleted private wireless data mistakenly collected by its "Street View" cars in Austria, Denmark and Ireland, the Internet giant said in a letter to US lawmakers.
Google, in the letter posted online Friday on the website of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives, also reiterated that the data was never used in any Google product or service.
Google also repeated an apology for the gathering of personal information sent over unsecured wireless networks by the Street View cars used to create the panoramic pictures featured in Google Maps
The letter from Pablo Chavez, Google's director of public policy, was in response to questions posed by US Congressmen Henry Waxman, Joe Barton and Edward Markey to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
According to Google, Sreet View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries inadvertently gathered fragments of personal information, so-called payload data, sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems.
Google is facing civil suits in Oregon and several other US states demanding millions of dollars in damages over its collection of personal wireless data.
Google is accused of violating local and federal privacy laws but Chavez said he did not believe Google had broken US law.
"We believe it does not violate US law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (i.e., not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user's device)," he said.
Src & Text: [physorg]
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