Korea joins privacy backlash over Google

The South Korean government appears to have its own BlackBerry headache with Google as it continues to show uneasiness about the data on its citizens kept in foreign servers.

But privacy watchdogs here are unsure who to distrust more; a global corporation that intercepts e-mail messages, passwords and other sensitive information from unsuspecting Internet users or an increasingly-intrusive government that demands the data be handed over.

Korean police raided Google’s Seoul office on Tuesday, representing the latest extension of legal challenges the Internet giant is facing around the world over its controversial ``Street View’’ mapping service. 

Investigators acting under warrant seized computer hard drives and company documents from the property during a search that continued for six hours as they 
look into the allegations that Google illegally collected and stored personal data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi wireless networks. They unlawfully gathered communications records may include e-mail and instant messages, passwords and search histories, according to police. 

It’s unlikely that the police will find anything meaningful from the haul as Google Korea says that the data collected from the Street View cars, which first appeared on the streets of Seoul in October last year, is stored in Google’s U.S. servers. 
After analyzing the data from the hard drives, a process that may take more than a month, police officials are planning to bring in a number of Google Korea officials for questioning.