Google has confessed to the data watchdog that it has yet to delete all the personal information it collected while building its Street View scheme, even though it had agreed to do so 18 months ago.
The admission – revealed by the Information Commissioner’s Office – was made in an email to the regulator, which also asked permission to delete the data.
Google said it discovered “a small portion of payload data … from the UK and other countries”. The email, which the ICO has made public, came from Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel.
The data was discovered during a manual review of thousands of disks, according to the email. One source claimed human error was to blame for its continued existence.
The ICO, however, has refused Google permission to delete the information, demanding that it examines exactly what data is still being held.
The ICO re-opened its investigation into Street View earlier this year, after the US Federal Communications Commission revealed in a report that Google knew its vehicles had collected user data. The FCC fined Google US$25,000 for impeding its investigation.
“The ICO is clear that this information should never have been collected in the first place and the company’s failure to secure its deletion as promised is cause for concern,” the regulator said in a statement released on its website on Friday.
Google has said in the past that it has never accessed the data, and has blamed a single engineer for its collection.
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