Canada's privacy commissioner said Tuesday that Google's recent Wi-Fi sniffing was a serious violation of Canadians' privacy rights and included the collection of personally identifiable information.

Jennifer Stoddart gave the search engine giant until February to implement a series of privacy safeguards; if it complies, she said she will consider the matter closed.

"Our investigation shows that Google did capture personal information – and, in some cases, highly sensitive personal information such as complete e-mails," Stoddart said in a statement. "This incident was a serious violation of Canadians' privacy rights."

In May, Google admitted that equipment attached to its Street View cars had inadvertently collected personal information that consumers sent over unencrypted wireless networks. The revelation has prompted inquiries from privacy officials all over the world, including Canada.

In July, data protection authorities in the U.K. said that they were satisfied that Google's Wi-Fi sniffing did not include any meaningful personal data about residents in the region.

Stoddart's office found just the opposite, she said. Her team, who travelled to Google's Mountain View headquarters to examine the data, found complete e-mails, e-mail addresses, usernames and passwords, names and residential telephone numbers and addresses. One document included the names of people suffering from a certain medical condition, as well as their phone numbers and addresses.

Stoddart's team examined only a sample of the data collected in Canada and could, therefore, not say exactly how much personal data was collected by Google.

"The impact of new and rapidly evolving technologies on modern life is undeniably exciting," Stoddart said. "However, the consequences for people can be grave if the potential privacy implications aren't properly considered at the development stage of these new technologies."

Stoddart asked Google to do four things before she would consider the matter closed: put in place a governance model to ensure that privacy is protected when new products are launched; enhance privacy training to foster compliance amongst all employees; designate an individual responsible for privacy issues; and delete the Canadian data.

Google has until Feb. 1, 2011 to comply with those requirements, at which time Stoddart said she will consider the matter resolved.

"As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks. As soon as we realised what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities," Google said in a statement. "We have been working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in its investigation and will continue to answer the commissioner's questions and concerns."

Last month, Stoddart completed a formal investigation into Facebook in the wake of the company's recent privacy policy updates. The social-networking site is not completely free of the commission, however, as it will continue to monitor Facebook features, including the "Like" button, she said.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 8:30pm with comment from Google.