Hong Kong — Internet search leader Google on Friday has consented to expunge all personal WiFi data accumulated by its “Street View” mapping service in Hong Kong, which resulted in the city’s Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data Roderick Woo said was a first and the regulating authority decided not to launch a formal investigation to the leading search engine.
The search engine titan is being scrutinized in a number of countries after the cars, which drive around taking photos for Google’s free online mapping service, mistakenly picked up the private information.
The camera of a street-view car, which is used to photograph the entire streets for Google maps.
After performing a conformity check on its collection of Wi-Fi payload data through its Street View car operation during the period from December 2008.
to October 2009 , Woo said Friday he had requested that Google completely erase all WiFi data collected in the city and should provide a third-party verification of such erasure, he said Woo.
The Mountain View, California-based search engine leader had given an assurance to remove the information and further said that its Street View cars would not collect WiFi data when they returned to the streets of Hong Kong, he said.
“This incident has sparked global privacy concern and many overseas data protection authorities have looked into similar incidents in their own jurisdictions,” Woo said in a statement on the commission’s website (www.pcpd.org.hk/).
“Until now, Hong Kong was the only privacy regulator which had successfully procured an undertaking and an affidavit from Google,” he said.
Woo said after the investigation was launched in May, displayed the data amassed by Google contained mostly fragmented email messages, Facebook “Wall” postings and the like but did not contain sensitive personal data, passwords or whole emails and could not directly identify any one individual. Woo decided not to carry out a formal investigation.
The Internet search and advertising behemoth has halted all Street View cars in May after disclosing that they had mistakenly gathered snippets of private data. They returned to the road in July in several countries but only after all wireless scanning equipment had been removed.
According to search engine giant Google, admitted last month that its Street View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries inadvertently collected and recorded fragments of unencrypted Wi-Fi data when only locations of Wi-Fi should have been recorded for their intended location services.
Street View, which was introduced in 2006, is a program that lets users view bird’s-eye view of street scenes from various angles in the world on Google Maps and take a virtual “walk” through cities such as New York, Paris or Hong Kong. The data collected is used to improve Google’s location-based services.