France fines Google over Street View data collection

Google has been fined €100,000 by the French authorities for last year's collection of network data.

The Commission Nationale de I'informatique et des Libertés said that the fine was in response to the 2010 incident in which vehicles taking images for the Street View service collected information from Wi-Fi networks.

Google has long maintained that it had not meant to harvest data from user networks, but that the collection was accidental and the result of a software glitch.

Government agencies including Germany, Spain and Italy opened investigations into the matter.

Additionally, more than 30 US states opened probes into the incident, seeking to investigate the full extent of the harvested information.

Google has said that it will co-operate with government agencies to hand over the information and delete the collected data. In the UK, the company agreed to a deal iwith the ICO to remove all of the Wi-Fi data.

The UK data was completely erased shortly before Christmas last year.

Privacy issues were a major concern for Google last year. In early 2010, the company was among the firms breached by the Operation Aurora attacks.

Later that year, Google drew the wrath of users for the handling of data in its Buzz social networking platform.