Britain’s data regulator has ordered Google to delete personal data scooped up in its Street View project or face contempt of court.
The Information Commissioner’s Office on Friday served Google Inc. with an enforcement notice. Google now has 35 days to kill material aggregated in the project that featured camera-toting vehicles shooting images of the world’s streets.
To make sense of the pictures, Google had to be able to precisely place where the properties being photographed were located. Using a computer program, the vehicles taking the images used local wi-fi outlets to place the properties, and in doing so, collected data from the wi-fi networks.
Google promised to destroy the data but found a cache of the material had surfaced last year.
