South Korea police raid Google office

The South Korean police raided the offices of Google Korea on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether the company illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.

The US search and advertising titan is already facing lawsuits and investigations in several countries in connection with private wireless data collected by its “Street View” cars. Street View, which was first launched in 2006, allows users to view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take a virtual walk through cities.

From late last year until May, Google Korea dispatched cars topped with cameras to cruise around South Korea to photograph neighbourhoods ahead of the planned lunch of Street View service in this country this year.

Police suspect those cars may have illegally captured and stored personal data from wireless networks while they were mapping streets, the Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency said in a statement.

“We will investigate Google Korea officials and scrutinise the data we confiscated today” to see whether company has violated the country’s laws on communications and privacy, it said.

“We intend to find out what kinds of data they have collected and how much. We will try to retrieve all the original data illegally collected and stored through domestic wi-fi networks from the Google headquarters.”

Google Korea officials were not immediately available for comment. Google, based in Mountain View, California, said previously that the collection of personal wireless data in other countries was unintentional and a blunder, and that the company would cooperate with investigations.

Google has had a hard time in South Korea’s internet market, which is dominated by a couple of domestic search engines. One, Daum, already runs a popular service akin to Street View.

Google said Tuesday it would introduce its Street View service in Germany before the year’s end, the Associated Press reported from Berlin.

The company said the feature will be available for the country’s 20 biggest cities and people can ask to have the photo of their house removed from the database starting next week — a move aimed at dispelling privacy fears.

It says Street View provides photographs of neighbourhoods taken by Google cameras, but faces and licence plates will be blurred.