The New York Times reports that officials are concerned that the data collected by Street View vehicles dispatched in South Korea violates the country's laws on communications and privacy.
A statement by the Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency says, in part:
"We will investigate Google Korea officials and scrutinize the data we confiscated today. ...
"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."
South Korea is the latest country to launch an official investigation into data that Google collected via its Street View cameras. Australia, Germany and the U.S. have already begun inquiries into Google's data collection from Wi-Fi networks. Australia has gone as far as to say that Google broke the country's privacy laws when cars equipped with Street View cameras captured data packets and other information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
Google acknowledged this blunder back in May, explaining that the data was collected because of a mistake in the original code.
Still, these apologies have done little to quell the ire of government officials and privacy groups. As a company that primarily deals with data collection, it is imperative that Google is seen by individuals and governments as trustworthy in how it collects and uses that information.