Google Hands Over Street View Wi-Fi Data

Google has announced that it has safely retrieved and secured the Wi-Fi data that company said had been "accidentally" captured by its Street View cars.

The announcement comes after the company was served with a class-action lawsuit, demanding that the company disclose how it plans to handle the situation.

According to a court filing made by Google in the Oregon federal court, the company said that it had copied all the data onto hard drives and handed them over to San Francisco-based information security firm iSEC Partners, which has locked the hard drives in a safe.

Earlier Google had claimed that it wanted to delete the collected data "as soon as possible", and that it was in the process of consulting with privacy agencies from all over the world on how to go about it.

Alexander Stamos, co-founder of iSEC Partners, said that Google had given the company four hard drives. The data stored on the drives had been classified into US data and data from other countries before being powerfully encrypted.