By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

Published: May 21, 2010

The growing number of requests by the European countries, and Hong Kong, raised the possibility that Google might be required to disclose for the first time exactly what its employees collected in 33 countries while compiling Street View. And that in turn increased the likelihood that Google, the world’s largest search engine company, could face fines or other penalties.
The company said Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland had asked it to retain the data collected from their citizens. Google has described the data as fragments of Web pages and e-mail messages recorded by its roving fleet of specially equipped vehicles.
In a statement, Google said that it had received the multiple requests to retain the Wi-Fi data and that privacy officials in Denmark and Austria, by contrast, had joined Ireland, in asking the search engine to destroy data collected in their countries.
Google did not say in its statement whether it was prepared go a step further and turn over the data it had collected to individual regulators.
Peter Church, a privacy lawyer at Linklaters in London, said it was likely that the countries asking Google to refrain from destroying their data would eventually seek to inspect the data themselves.
“I would imagine that they would want to have a look at this information,” Mr. Church said. “Was Google just looking at the headers of the Wi-Fi information or were they looking at the content? I would imagine that the authorities in these jurisdictions will now look at the information. They will want to know whether or not it was tiny snippets of information, as Google has said, or something more.”
Hana Stepankova, a spokeswoman for the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection, confirmed that her office was investigating. She said it was too early to say whether regulators would ask to see the Czech data.
“In a country like the Czech Republic, which has had a history of secret surveillance before 1989, people are still very sensitive about anyone trying to listen in to their private business,” Ms. Stepankova said.
Google attributed its decision to withhold the data as a concession to “uncertainty” among privacy regulators, one of which, Google said, initially asked it to delete, and then retain, its data. Google did not identify the country.
“Following requests from the Irish, Danish and Austrian data protection authorities, we can confirm that we have deleted payload data identified as coming from those countries,” Google said Friday. “We can also confirm that, as requested, we are keeping data from Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Given that there is some uncertainty about deletion generally, for example one data protection authority changed its instruction from delete to retain in the last 24 hours, we think it makes sense to keep the remaining country data while we work through these issues.”
Pressure from the German data supervisor in Hamburg, where Google Germany is based, prompted Google on May 14 to disclose that it had collected 600 gigabytes of data from unsecured Wi-FI networks in 33 countries and Hong Kong for Street View.
So far, only the data protection supervisor in Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, and the privacy commissioner in Hong Kong, Roderick B. Woo, have asked for copies of the data collected in their countries.
Google has said that it collected the data inadvertently through a programming error.
But fallout from the disclosure continued to reverberate. In the United States on Thursday, the chairman Federal Trade Commission said it would conduct an informal review of Google’s collection efforts. Regulators in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are also questioning the company.
In Portland, Ore., two computer users filed a class-action suit in United States District Court against Google on behalf of residents in Oregon and Washington.