French regulators: Google snagged passwords, e-mail

Google collected passwords and e-mail when the company intercepted and stored data detected on open Wi-Fi hot spots in France, according to the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty.

The commission launched an investigation in early June after Google admitted that it had stored fragments of personal information from open Wi-Fi hot spots as its fleet of vehicles drove around neighborhoods around the world collecting data for its Street View mapping service. Google collected data in 30 countries.

Google claims that it had been collecting only fragments of payload data because vehicles were on the move and could only get information when they passed places where an unsecured Wi-Fi network in use.

For more on this story, read French regulators: Google snagged passwords, e-mail on CNET News.