Accidental public disclosures of data are serious threat to online privacy, but a more serious threat lay in potential demands on Google by government's instructions, its CEO said on Wednesday.

    Eric Schmidt told the Search Engine Strategies industry conference that Google had put all necessary safeguards to protect its users' personal data from theft or accidental release.

    But "a more serious threat to user privacy lay in potential demands on Google by governments to make the company give up data on its customer's surfing habits," he was quoted as saying.

    "The more interesting question is something where a government, not just the U.S. government but maybe a non-U.S. government would try to get in Google's computer systems," Schmidt said.

    Schmidt's remarks followed last weekend's discovery by online privacy sleuths that AOL, a key Google search customer, had mistakenly released personally identifiable data on 20 million keyword searches by its users, which was referred to as "obviously a terrible thing" by Schmidt as the released data was not anonymized enough.

    Google won kudos from privacy advocates for going to court to block a U.S. government request for data on Google users earlier this year. Schmidt warned that such intrusions could occur again. Enditem