Britain's privacy watchdog is to look again at what personal information internet giant Google gathered from private wi-fi networks.
The Information Commissioner's Office had investigated a sample earlier this year after it was revealed that Google had collected personal data during its Street View project.
Google has admitted that e-mails and passwords were copied.
Privacy watchdogs in numerous countries, including France, Germany and Canada, had also investigated the information.
"It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords,"Mr Eustace wrote.(Google senior vice president)
"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, but confident that... changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users."
Information about the gathering of personal data came to light following a request by data protection authorities in Hamburg, Germany, for more information about the operation of Google's Street View technology which adds images of locations to maps.
This revealed that Google had "accidentally" grabbed data from unsecured hotspots for years as its Street View cars captured images of street scenes. In total it is thought to have grabbed about 600 gigabytes of data.
It led to many data protection authorities pressing Google for access to the mass of data it grabbed to see whether laws on the protecting of personal information had been broken.
So for those who haven't secured their wifi, time to do so ?
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