Google has finally destroyed the last remaining data from its Street View camera cars’ illegal recordings of private Wi-Fi transmissions, Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim has revealed.
The Privacy Commissioner last week asked Google to immediately destroy the material after being advised of its existence (CDN, Thursday). He said in a media statement at the weekend that he had since received an e-mail from Google, confirming that all 21 hard drives containing the offending data had been destroyed.
The destruction process was verified by US computer forensics company Stroz Friedberg.
Of the 21 hard drives, 20 were first overwritten completely to reduce the chances of any data being recovered from them. The remaining hard drive was physically damaged, and could not be overwritten in the same manner.
All 21 hard drives were then physically destroyed, with personnel from Stroz Friedberg supervising.
Pilgrim said he had asked Google to now undertake an audit to ensure that no other disks containing payload data exist, and to advise him once this audit is completed. Google had told him it is undertaking this process.
