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Australia Orders Google To Delete Personal Data Once And For All

The camera mounted on a Google Street View car used to photograph whole streets obscures part of the U.S. Internet giant's logo.
Daniel Mihailescu
/
AFP/Getty Images
The camera mounted on a Google Street View car used to photograph whole streets obscures part of the U.S. Internet giant's logo.

Australia's privacy commissioner is asking Google to delete all personal data its Street View vehicles collected from unsecured wi-fi networks. The directive comes a little more than a week after Google said that in error, it had kept a small portion of the 600 gigabytes it collected.

As we reported, the slurped data is known to include passwords, emails, pictures and web searches.

Australia's Herald Sun reports:

"Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim told the tech giant he was "concerned" at revelations extra data had been found "particularly as Google had advised that the data was destroyed".

"'Organisations that retain personal information that is no longer required could leave individuals at risk should it be misused,' Mr Pilgrim wrote in an email dated August 6.

"'I appreciate your advising me of this matter, and look forward to confirmation that the data has been destroyed.'

Pilgrim also told Google that he would like third-party confirmation that the data has been deleted.

One thing to note is that it was Google who admitted to having the data.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.