Google urged to tighten privacy protections

Canada's privacy watchdog accused Google Inc <GOOG.O> on Tuesday of violating the rights of thousands of Canadians by inappropriately collecting their personal information in building its Street View service.

Google must tighten its privacy protection systems to prevent a repeat of the incident, blamed on a careless software engineer, and should get rid of the data it accidentally collected, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said.

"Our investigation shows that Google did capture personal information — and, in some cases, highly sensitive personal information such as complete e-mails. This incident was a serious violation of Canadians' privacy rights," Stoddart said in a news release.

Google has found itself in the cross-hairs of privacy officials in several countries since it acknowledged in May that the fleet of cars used to take images for Street View were also collecting personal information from unsecured home wireless networks as they drove by.

Google official said they were unaware of the computer code that allowed the "payload data" to be collected when the software was installed in the cars that take pictures used to present street-level scenes for Google's mapping service, Stoddart said.

"This incident was the result of a careless error — one that could easily have been avoided," the commissioner aid.

Canadian investigators, who looked at a sample of the the data collected by Google, said it included complete e-mails, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers, but it was not possible to know how much information was collected, Stoddart said.