On Friday, Google admitted in an e-mail to the British data protection authority (PDF), the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), that it was still in possession of a “small portion of payload data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK.”

In December 2010, Google said it had deleted all such data in the UK.

A person familiar with the matter told Ars by phone on Friday that similar notifications had gone out to Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and Australia.

The Associated Press also reports that a representative of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland said that this new revelation violates previous agreements with European authorities and is "clearly unacceptable."

Google re-scanning its disks

In the letter, Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, wrote that “in recent months,” the company has been “reviewing its handling of Street View disks and undertaking a comprehensive manual review of our Street View disk inventory.

“That review involves the physical inspection and re-scanning of thousands of disks,” he added. “In conducting that review we have determined that we continue to have payload data from the UK and other countries.”

The person familiar with the matter also stressed that the correspondence between Google and regulators was “confidential," adding that the company was not interested in giving a "running commentary" on interactions with regulators.

That comment seems to suggest that had the ICO not published Google’s letter on Friday that the public would not be informed of this new development.

Dormant investigations could be reignited

Google has been under fire from various data protection authorities around the world over its collection of open, unencrypted WiFi data as part of the Street View project. In a report released by the Federal Communications Commission in April 2012, Google was found to have knowingly snooped on such WiFi data, but the case was dropped, and the company was fined a paltry $25,000.

European—particularly German—data protection authorities, who are well-known for being more stringent with such matters, have ongoing investigations and some are even weighing whether to bring criminal charges. A spokesperson for the Hamburg data protection authority told Ars in May that as a result of the FCC report, the agency felt “duped” by Google.

In a response (PDF) posted to the ICO website, Steve Eckersley, the agency’s head of enforcement, said that the ICO would examine the remaining data and stressed that it should be stored securely until the examination was complete.

“Once that examination has been completed, I will be in a better position to advise you on how to proceed in terms of destruction,” he wrote. “In the meantime, could you please start the arrangements to enable us to examine the data as soon as practicable.”