The Information Commissioner's Office, the British privacy watchdog, said it will again look into Google's collection of personal information from private Wi-fi networks. The office had earlier made an inquiry over Google's Street View Project, which collected personal data from Wi-Fi networks.

Initially, Google said that the data collected did not include significant personal details. Later on, the company admitted that information such as account passwords and e-mails were also collected.

Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice president, wrote on the company's official blog that Google was "mortified" to learn that personal information had been gathered. Similar investigations have also been launched by privacy watchdogs in Canada, France and Germany.

"It's clear from those [external] inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords... We want to delete this data as soon as possible and I would like to apologise again for the fact that we collected it in the first place," Eustace wrote.

"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that... changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users."

Data protection watchdogs in Hamburg, Germany, initially brought attention to the collection of information for Google's Street View technology. The authorities requested for information about the operation of the service, which adds images of locations to maps. The inquiry revealed that Google had taken information from unsecured hotspots as cars for the Street View service took images of streets.