Personal data mistakenly collected by Google cars over the past three years for its Street View service will be handed to the Privacy Commissioner to examine and destroy.
Representatives from the search engine giant met Roderick Woo Bun in his office yesterday after admitting last week that it had collected and recorded unencrypted Wi-fi data when only Wi-fi locations should have been recorded as its cars drove around various cities compiling data for Google Maps.
The data might include e-mails or details about which websites a person had visited.
'As privacy commissioner of Hong Kong, I demanded Google release all the personal information that it collected through its cars for me to examine,' Woo said after the meeting, which he said was conducted harmoniously. 'This information will be obliterated afterwards. Google also promised that similar incidents will not occur again in the future.'
Woo signed an agreement with Google in which the company promised to suspend its street cars until it fixed the problem.
Woo said Google would also carry out an internal check on the workflow of the incident to study how the mistake happened and why it was not discovered for three years.
'Results of the check will be passed to us and disclosed to the public,' Woo said, adding that Google had appointed an independent third party to scrutinise the software that led to the mistake.