14 DAY TRIAL // In a somewhat surprising move, South Korean police raided Google offices in the country and confiscated hard drives and documents. The raids were related to the Street View Wi-Fi personal data collection, which was revealed by Google a few months ago
"[We] have been investigating Google Korea on suspicion of unauthorized collection and storage of data on unspecified Internet users from Wi-Fi networks," the Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency said in a statement.
The Korean National Police Agency raided Google’s offices earlier today. It is unclear why it took them so long to act, but the police says it hopes to find data related to, what they call, “illegal” Wi-Fi snooping.
“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,” the police added.
Google had previously said that all of the personal Wi-Fi data collected from open wireless networks was stored on a few hard drives at its headquarters in the US. As such, there should be absolutely no ‘payload’ data on the drives the police confiscated from the Seoul offices.
What’s more, the Wi-Fi snooping code and hardware was removed from the Street View cars and it is unlikely that a copy would be available on the computers of Google employees in South Korea.
Google had been capturing imagery in South Korea since last year and had planned to launch the Street View service later this year. The company has stopped acquiring images in the country in May.
The company has not been finding it easy to crack the Korean search market which is dominated by local players. One local company already provides a service very similar to Street View.
Earlier this year Google admitted to capturing payload data from open wireless networks with its Street View cars. The Wi-Fi equipment was only supposed to capture the location of the wireless networks to help its navigational services, but, through an error, Google says, it also acquired fragments of payload data from unprotected networks.