Google guilty of accidentally collecting e-mails, URLs, passwords

According to Google’s blog post on Friday, data was mistakenly collected in more than 30 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, some of Europe, and parts of Asia.

Posted by senior vice president of engineering and research Alan Eustace, the blog post admitted how "we failed badly here". Eustace added that Google has spent months analyzing how to strengthen their internal privacy and security practices.

"We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place," Eustace confessed.

This is not the instance of accidentally data-collection by the search enging giant. In May, Google announced that it had collected unencrypted WiFi data by mistake through its Street View service - but the severity of the situation was unknown.

According to a Google spokesperson, the company first became aware of the problem when the Data Protection Authority in Germany asked Google to review all of the data collected through its Street View cars as part of a routine check.

But when Google went back and looked at the data, it transpired that in along with WiFi hot spot data, they were mistakenly collecting information that was being sent across unencrypted networks.

For the information to have been collected by Google, a person had to have been sending something over an unencrypted network at the same time that a Street View car was collecting data in that same location.

According to Google, the vast majority of the data is in fragments, but in the past week several countries have issued reports that they have found entire emails and passwords.

Since then, Google has said how the data has been segregated and secured, and WiFi data is no longer being collected from Street View cars – additionally Google has said it has deleted data collected from Ireland, Austria, Denmark and Hong Kong,

Nevertheless, other countries have opened their own investigations, and Google has not been given permission from authorities to delete the data.