The CNIL said Google was not responding quickly enough to privacy-related requests, adding that the company had not complied with a request to provide the element of the cars' software that resulted in the data collection. Google has always said it never meant to gather details of people's routers, emails and passwords, and has blamed this harvesting on rogue experimental code.
In a separate statement on Monday, Google global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said the company was "profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks".
Deleting the data has always been our priority, and we're happy the CNIL has given permission for us to do so.
– Peter Fleischer, Google
"As soon as we realised what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities," Fleischer said. "Deleting the data has always been our priority, and we're happy the CNIL has given permission for us to do so."
On Thursday, European justice commissioner Viviane Reding said national data protection authorities' response to the Wi-Fi-sniffing scandal had been ineffectual and inconsistent.
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