Connecticut's top prosecutor plans to call on Google Inc on Monday to say whether it had collected data from personal and business wireless networks without the owners' permission.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will make the call at a Hartford, Connecticut, press conference, his office said.

The most-used U.S. search engine last month acknowledged that the fleet of cars it uses to take photos of streets around the world for a three-dimensional mapping service had for several years been collecting information from open WiFi networks that could include e-mail messages and passwords.

Google officials in May said the collections had been accidental -- the company had intended to collect information on WiFi hotspots for other location-based services.

Australia's attorney general on Sunday asked that country's police to investigate whether Google had broken telecommunications privacy laws by collecting the WiFi data.

Google's fleet of camera-equipped vehicles have traveled the roads of more than 30 countries since 2006, collecting photos for the company's Street View mapping service. They have also been lightning rods for controversy, with privacy advocates contending that some of its cameras shot over fences into private homes.

Google said on Sunday it would cooperate with the Australia police investigation.

Blumenthal, a 64-year-old Democrat, is running for the U.S. Senate, seeking to fill the seat to be vacated by the retiring Christopher Dodd.

(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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