Sydney – On Sunday, Australia has announced a police inquiry into the alleged illegal practice of the Google in seeking private information from the wireless networks. The country is to probe the web giant’s “Street View” mapping service, as more and more people and the regulators are complaining about the lenient attitude of the Google towards maintaining the private information of its users.

On the other hand, Google tries to maintain that the users’ privacy is of great importance to the company and has also acknowledged last month how it mistakenly collected data over public Wi-Fi networks from around at least 30 countries while taking images of neighborhoods for the Street View feature (that allows pictures of neighborhoods by Google cameras, and is controversial in terms of maintaining privacy of the public). They also admitted that the problem was discovered only after the German regulators brought it to their notice.

Meanwhile, the Australian government investigation involves whether the pictures taken by the Google executives are in line with the country’s privacy laws or have violated them.

Google on the other hand admits that its collection of snippets from public mails and web browsing being carried on the public Wi-Fi networks was as an error and that it has already taken appropriate measures to deal with this to avoid its recurrence in future.

[AP]