Google office in South Korea raided

South Korean police have raided Google offices yesterday as part of their investigation into whether the search engine giant had illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.

Google are already facing several lawsuits in various countries in relation to claims of private wireless data being stored for use in ‘Street View', a service started in 2006.

Google Korea have been using cars outfitted with cameras for the last year to update its database system for the panoramic street scene system. The issue however is that the police suspect Google were also illegally capturing personal data from wireless networks while they were street mapping.

The Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency issued this statement: “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.”

Google have confirmed to Reuters that the South Korean police did visit the companies offices in conjunction with their investigation and they said they would cooperate fully with the investigation.

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