Google has had to make the pretty embarrassing admission that, for the past three years, the company has wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks.

The official company line is that it had been “mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks”, with the revelations coming to light after German authorities asked to audit the data the company’s Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.

The BBC notes that these snippets could include parts of an email, text or photograph or even the website someone may be viewing. In a blogpost Google said as soon as it became aware of the problem it grounded its Street View cars from collecting wi-fi information and segregated the data on its network.

Google said the problem dated back to 2006 when “an engineer working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data”.

That code was included in the software the Street View cars used and “quite simply, it was a mistake”, said Alan Eustace senior vice president of engineering and research with the company. He added, “This incident highlights just how publicly accessible, open, non-password protected wi-fi networks are today.”

Google is now asking for a third party to review the software that caused the problem and examine precisely what data had been gathered. “Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short,” wrote Eustace. “The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here.”