LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - If investigators are true in their assumptions, Google downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road.

It has been two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was all a "mistake."

There are fresh accusations of a cover-up after U.S. regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars scoured the country -- but failed to act.

Technology Web sites and bloggers have suggested that Google harvested the information simply because it was able to do so and would later work out a way to use it to generate cash.

In contrast, the quick actions of watchdogs in Germany, France and the Czech Republic offset the slow reaction of the Information Commissioner's Office to deal with the alleged data theft.

In Germany, Google was forced to stop filming for Street View owing to privacy concerns by Hamburg prosecutors, who opened a criminal investigation.

In France, Google was fined £87,000 by the privacy regulator CNIL, the largest it had ever handed out.

A report last month by the U.S. media regulator the Federal Communications Commission revealed that the Google programmer who wrote the Street View software repeatedly warned that it collected personal data, and called for a legal and privacy review.

Forty-one-year-old Marius Milner, a British software engineer from Hove, East Sussex, who now lives in California. He has pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and refused to answer investigators' questions.

Milner's stepmother said, "He has always had a love of computers, even from an early age I think. He is a brilliant mind.

"He got a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. My husband is an elderly man. He is nearly 90 and he is rather distressed by this. We really don't want to say any more."

The FCC has since attacked Google for inadequate oversight of Street View, and claimed it was planning to use the data collected for other internal projects.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner's Office said it would examine what Google knew at the time and whether it breached the Data Protection Act.

Critics said the ICO was doing "too little, too late," and pointed to its earlier report into Street View which concluded that any collection of personal data was "inadvertent."

© 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.