UK: Google was allowed to destroy data haul after ICO spent less than three hours examining information collected by Street Cars

Daniel Martin reports:

Britain’s privacy watchdog spent less than three hours examining the private information stolen by Google’s fleet of Street Cars, it emerged yesterday.

Phil Jones, formerly a senior member of the Information Commissioner’s Office, said it had not wanted to spend money on hiring a computer expert to fully analyse the material.

Instead they spent just over two hours looking at a small sample of the information which had been captured from home computers.

The commission then gave Google permission to destroy the evidence even though it had not been properly sifted.