SEOUL — The South Korean police raided the offices of Google Korea on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether the company had illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.
The U.S. search titan is already facing lawsuits and investigations in several countries in connection with private wireless data collected for its Street View service. Street View, which was started in 2006, allows users to view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take virtual walks through cities.
From late last year until May, Google Korea dispatched cars topped with cameras to cruise around the country to photograph neighborhoods before the planned introduction of Street View there this year.
The police suspect that those cars might 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 scrutinize the data we confiscated today” to see whether the 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,” the response center said. “We will try to retrieve all the original data illegally collected and stored through domestic Wi-Fi networks from the Google headquarters.”
Google, based in Mountain View, California, said, “We will cooperate with the investigation and answer any questions they have,” Bloomberg News reported.
Google said previously that the collection of personal data in other countries had been unintentional and the company would cooperate with investigations.
Google has had a hard time in South Korea. One domestic search engine, Daum, already runs a popular service akin to Street View.
Google said Tuesday that it would introduce Street View in Germany before the end of the year, The Associated Press reported from Berlin.
Google said the feature would be available for the 20 biggest German cities and people could ask to have the photographs of their houses removed from the database starting next week — an offer aimed at dispelling privacy fears.
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