Christopher Graham, The Information Commissioner, said his office was continuing its investigation into Google’s Street View project, which sent out cars to photograph residential streets.
Google, in a blog post on Friday, admitted that during the process the vehicles had "mistakenly" collected emails and passwords from computers on private Wi-Fi networks.
The news comes just 10 days after Google’s UK and Ireland managing director, Matt Brittin, told an audience at the AOP Digital Publishing Summit that Google collected the minimum possible amount of people’s personal data and that "publishers have to be thoughtful about what data they collect and use".
But the search giant clearly failed to apply that principle when it was photographing residential streets.
In May the ICO launched an investigation into allegations that Google had collected private information. At the time it concluded the collected data was "fragmentary".
However, it is continuing to monitor the findings of 30 of its international counterparts, where the firm admitted it had collected information from Wi-Fi networks.
Alan Eustace, vice-president of engineering and research at Google, in a blog post, wrote, "We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place. We are mortified by what happened."
Google has responded to the furore by appointing a director of privacy, Alma Whitten, who said,"We are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks.
"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. This data has never been used in any Google product and was never intended to be used by Google."
Brittin, speaking at the AOP event on 15 October, said, "People think Google has all the information on everything they do. In fact, we are very thoughtful about privacy and data.
"We collect the minimum amount of data on people. There needs to be a little bit more education about what data is being used for and publishers have to be thoughtful about what data they collect and use."
