Google deletes private data collected by Street View cars

Google has admitted that data collected by its Street View service has only just been completely deleted.

The first batch of data was deleted in November, by a third party, New York-based computer forensic company Stroz Friedberg. In an email confirming the deletion, the company's John Curran, executive managing director, wrote: "On November 24, 2010, Stroz Friedberg deleted irretrievably the United Kingdom payload data."

Despite this, Google admitted that some data still needed to be deleted. The company has announced this has now been done.

The delay in deleting all the data came to light after a Freedom of Information request was made by a member of the public for correspondence between the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and Google regarding the controversy.

In an email dated 26 November, Peter Fleishcher, Google's Global Privacy counsel, wrote: "There is some data from the UK, which we haven't been able to delete yet. This relates to data that was still on Street View car disks at the time we discovered our mistake in May.

"Because these disks could contain data from countries where we have received preservation requests from the authorities, we must make sure that in deleting the UK data we don't disturb the surrounding data."

In a statement, Google said it was "profoundly sorry for mistakenly collecting payload data in the UK from unencrypted wireless networks". The company continued by saying had co-operated closely with the ICO.

"As we have said before, we did not want this data, have never used any of it in our products or services, and have sought to delete it as quickly as possible.

"We can confirm that the UK data has now been deleted, and that this has been independently certified."