Google faces heavy fine for breach of security

Google could become the first company to incur heavy fines under British privacy laws, after it admitted downloading of private emails and passwords.

According to Britain's Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, he was launching a new investigation into the Street View project, in which Google sent cars around photographing residential streets.

In the process, Google 'mistakenly'' collected entire email messages and passwords from private computers on wireless  networks.  

The breach of privacy has angered campaigners who say the exercise should not have been undertaken by Google in the first place.

According to Alex Deane, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, building up a database of photographs of millions of people's private homes was bad enough, but the news that Google has also 'harvested' email addresses and passwords was nothing short of outrageous.

He added that Google must launch an urgent investigation into how the gross invasion of privacy had been allowed to happen.