Google Mapping Worries Spread

Police raided Google's South Korean offices to probe potential violations of the country's telecommunication-privacy law, in the latest move by authorities to ratchet up scrutiny of the Internet search giant's practices.

Police said Thursday that Google Inc.

Google said more than 244,000 households in Germany's 20 largest cities had formally requested that their homes be blurred before the launch of the Internet giant's Street View mapping service there in several weeks.

Australia announced a police investigation Sunday into whether Google illegally collected private information from wireless networks, becoming at least the second country to probe the Internet giant's "Street View" mapping service.

The Australian criminal investigation comes as more regulators and consumers watchdogs around the world are complaining that Google doesn't take people's privacy seriously enough.

Google will introduce its "Street View" mapping feature for 20 of Germany's largest cities before the end of the year, the company announced Tuesday, launching a new debate over privacy in Germany.

German officials have been one of the harshest critics of the "Street View" program, which provides detailed photographs of neighborhoods taken by Google cameras.

At the insistence of authorities, the faces of individuals and licenses plates will be blurred.

Google has selected INRIX’s Real-time Traffic to help power its navigation and mapping applications, we learned today. The service is initially available in 8 countries across Europe, including the U.K. and Germany with plans to roll out into addition markets by the end of the year.

Canada's privacy commissioner said Tuesday Google broke Canadian privacy laws when it accidentally collected personal information from unsecured wireless networks while putting together its Street View mapping service.

An investigation by Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart's office found complete emails, addresses, usernames and passwords. Even a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions was collected.

Stoddart said thousands of Canadians were likely affected by what amounted to a careless error on the part of an engineer.

The real world continues to push back against Google's virtual Street View. On Tuesday, South Korean police raided the company's offices as they investigated whether the search giant illegally collected personal wireless information.