Google to delete illegally collected emails, passwords

Google has admitted its StreetView cars collected entire emails and passwords which it now intended to delete, according to a statement made Friday.

Google's earlier claim that it did not collect anything that wasn't already in the public domain was made before it actually checked the detail of the data it mistakenly collected, the company said.

"So we did not know for sure what the disks contained," explained Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research on Google's Public Policy blog. But recent inspections of that data by regulators revealed it had. "It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords."