Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is close to an agreement to pay about $7 million to settle allegations that the company improperly collected personal data for its Street View product, Bloomberg news and The Associated Press report.

The company has reached an agreement in principle with more than 30 states, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The resolution could be announced as early as next week, another person said.

During a three-year period starting in 2007, the company improperly gleaned “sensitive personal information,” including e-mail and text messages, passwords and Web-use history, from non-secured Wi-Fi networks,the Federal Communications Commission said last year.

Google, operator of the world’s largest search engine, has been grappling with scrutiny by government officials around the world over how it handles private information. The FCC fined Google $25,000 last year for not cooperating with an investigation into the company’s collection of the data.

“We work hard to get privacy right at Google,” Nadja Blagojevic, a spokeswoman the Mountain View, California-based company, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. “But in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”
Blagojevic declined to comment on a possible settlement.

The $7 million will be shared among all the states, the person said. Google’s revenue this year is expected to surpass $61 billion.

At that pace, Google brings in an average of $7 million in revenue per hour.

Google revealed in 2010 that company cars taking street-level photos for its online mapping service also had been vacuuming up personal data transmitted over wireless networks that weren’t protected by passwords. Google blamed the snooping, which started in 2007, on an overzealous engineer who installed an intrusive piece of software on equipment that the company said was only supposed to detect the location of wireless networks.

That explanation didn’t placate outraged privacy watchdogs or government regulators in the U.S. and other countries who opened investigations into the company’s surveillance of Wi-Fi networks that were operating mostly in homes and small businesses.

The multistate inquiry in the U.S. initially was being led by Connecticut, which is now part of an executive committee overseeing the matter.

A spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen declined to say whether Google had agreed to a settlement. The investigation is still “active and ongoing,” Jepsen spokeswoman Susan Kinsman said Friday.

Google has maintained it didn’t break any U.S. laws by grabbing information sent over open networks, but has repeatedly apologized for a breach of online etiquette. The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., issued another note of contrition when contacted Friday.

Google has committed other privacy gaffes that have gotten it into trouble with the FTC. In the most expensive episode so far, Google last year faced allegations that it had been secretly tracking the online activities of Web surfers using Apple Inc.’s Safari browser. Without acknowledging any wrongdoing, Google paid a $22.5 million fine to the FTC in that case.