Google has decided to give in to government pressure and hand over the WiFi data it accidentally collected to government agencies. Germany, France, and Spain will be among the first to get the data out of Google in the next two days, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times, and other countries may get data in the coming weeks.

The decision comes only a week after Google said it wasn't so sure about the legal issues involved in handing the data over to various governments. Officials in Germany and Hong Kong had demanded the data upon learning of its existence, but Google said that local privacy laws (particularly in Germany) might bar the company from releasing it. Google didn't necessarily say no, though—the company asked for more time to review the situation, and has now apparently come to an agreement to transfer the data to the appropriate government officials.

When it comes to what kind of data was collected by Google's Street View cars, the possibilities are endless. The company thought it was merely collecting public WiFi information, such as SSID information and MAC addresses, but it turns out it also grabbed some 600GB worth of payload data—essentially, packets being sent from users on those networks. This could include searches, e-mails, chats, porn, and more. (This is why you shouldn't be doing sensitive surfing on open WiFi networks, by the way, because there are plenty of shady characters aside from Google who are interested in sniffing your packets.) When asked whether bank account details could be included in the data, Schmidt told the Times that he couldn't rule out that possibility.

"We screwed up. Let's be very clear about that," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. "If you are honest about your mistakes it is the best defense for it not happening again."

When Google first announced its discovery that it was, in fact, collecting WiFi payload data, the company said an engineer "wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data" as part of an experimental project back in 2006. A year later when the mobile team began to collect the basic SSID and MAC data, they mistakenly included the code in their software without realizing what they were doing, according to Google.

Schmidt didn't say directly whether the engineer was working on the project as part of his "20 percent time," but he defended the company's decision to allow employees to be independent and creative.

At this point, handing over the data to German, French, and Spanish officials will only give Google some breathing room in those countries. Last week, a federal judge in the US ordered Google to turn over copies of its hard drives with the data and some believe that Google is on the verge of an investigation under the Swiss Data Protection Act.

As several of our readers have pointed out, 600GB of data across all Street View cars in all countries isn't much, relatively speaking. It's likely that, once government regulators begin digging in, the most interesting thing they'll find is just how mundane most of our lives really are. Still, the fact that it's out there in the hands of Google—and now certain governments—is unsettling for many Internet users. We have no doubt that there will be more uproar over this issue in the months to come, especially if someone comes forward about exactly what kind of personal tidbits were found in Google's archives.