Wow! When they called it snail mail, they weren't joking.

Got a reply yesterday.

Essentially, the story is the information is collection and maintained by Google in the U.S. - where I basically have no data protection rights.

They did seem to suggest that I wasn't using the 'proper legal channel' which was irritating - though I would have said that when only 1 contact address is given then that is the proper legal channel - which I contact at considerable personal expense.

Anyway, I might just e-mail them (now that I have an e-mail address) and see where I get - which I suspect at this point is nowhere (not criticizing Google - if the information is in the US , then fair's fair.)

This looks like a challenge:

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=514742&cid=22998138

So I'm going to write to google and see what they say.

I'll be making the application under the Irish Data Protection Acts as described here:
http://www.dataprotection.ie/ViewDoc.asp?fn=/documents/rights/2d.htm&CatID=17&m=r

Just in case anyone thinks I'm doing this to annoy Google - I'm not. It's just a simple test. The result is going to be (a) Google were really nice and did exactly what I asked of them in a friendly way or (b) Google laugh me out of their office and get me to sue.

The person I have to write to is Graham Law (http://www.google.ie/intl/en/contact/index.html) who doesn't have an e-mail address, so I have to use the old snail mail.