UK - Official Slams Google Street View

Member of British Parliament, Robert Halfon, has called for an “Internet Bill of Rights” that he says would give citizens an easy and affordable means of protecting their Internet privacy.

This would be preferable to "immediately implementing state action," Halfon said.

Fellow member Ian Lucas, however, was not convinced self-regulation would be effective and pushed for stronger action.

Google admitted in May that equipment attached to its Street View cars had accidentally collected data traveling over unencrypted wi-fi networks, Google later admitted the data contained entire e-mails, URLs, and passwords.

Halfon and Lucas's made the remarks on Thursday, during an on line session of British parliament.

The British Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has since re-opened its investigation into Google's wi-fi data collection, in July, the ICO had said it was satisfied that the data Google collected did not include any meaningful personal data about residents in the region.

Hafton accused the ICO of being lazy in its investigation and making a "public whitewash" of the facts he went on to say Street view was much more dangerous than state surveillance.

because "there is a social contract between governments and citizens" but the same contract does not exist between companies and citizens. "This time it has gone too far."

Google made an apology and pledged to delete all the data it collected.

Last week Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, caused quite a stir when he joked on CNN, people who do not like Street View can "just move." He later said he misspoke and reiterated that Google will remove any offending images.

On Wednesday, the FTC closed its investigation into Google's wi-fi data collection, saying recent privacy changes have satisfied its concerns.