Google discovered its error after auditing its Street View Wi-Fi data at the request of the Hamburg, Germany, data protection authority.

The company will now hire a third party to audit the software that Street View used and ensure that all potentially sensitive data was deleted.

"In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it's best to stop our Street View cars collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely," Google added.

Because the Street View cars are usually in motion, they probably would have recorded only snippets of information from open networks, but they could have picked up sensitive data from unencrypted Web sites, including Google's own Gmail service, which only recently started requiring encrypted (HTTPS) Web connections.

"Next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search," Google said.