France has become the latest country to hold Google to account over a privacy breach that saw the search engine giant mistakenly gather and store data over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, AP reported. The French independent privacy watchdog CNIL said Thursday that following its complaint, Google had handed over copies of the e-mails, browsing history, banking details and other fragments of data sucked up by Google technicians cruising French streets photographing neighborhoods for the website's «Street View» mapping feature. A spokesman for the Mountain View, California-based company said Google has been handing over data to authorities in the affected countries for the past two weeks. CNIL said it is still examining the data that it received from Google on June 4. The organization may yet seek financial or criminal penalties over the privacy breach, the organization's head Yann Padova said at a news conference. Padova said it remains unknown how many individuals and how many cities had their private data collected by Google. Last month, Google acknowledged it had mistakenly collected data over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. Google says it has stopped grabbing Wi-Fi data from its Street View vehicles since it discovered the data collection problem last month following an inquiry by German regulators. -- SPA
