Google Inc will pay $7 million to 38 states and the District of Columbia to settle an investigation into a controversial incident in which its Street View mapping cars collected passwords and other personal data from home wireless networks between 2008 and 2010.
The deal, details of which were reported last week, ends a nearly three-year investigation.
Google, the world's largest Internet search engine, has said the incident was a mistake owing to a piece of experimental computer code included in the cars' software. It said the data was not used in any Google services.
Google agreed in Tuesday's deal to eventually destroy the data collected in the United States. It is working with various European countries to determine how to handle the data it collected there.
