Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook

WHAT a disgusting disgrace! Bank Sends Sensitive E-mail to Wrong Gmail Address, Sues Google.

A Wyoming bank sent an e-mail containing sensitive customer data to the wrong Gmail account, and now wants Google to reveal the identity of the account holder who received the data.

According to a court document in the case, in August a customer of the Rocky Mountain Bank asked a bank employee to send certain loan statements to a representative of the customer. The employee, however, inadvertently sent the e-mail to the wrong Gmail address. Additionally, the employee had attached a sensitive file to the e-mail that should not have been sent at all.

The attachment contained confidential information on 1,325 individual and business customers that included their names, addresses, tax identification or Social Security numbers and loan information.

After realizing what he’d done, the employee “tried to recall the e-mail without success.”

When that didn’t work, the employee sent a second e-mail to the recipient instructing the person to delete the e-mail and attachment “in its entirety” without opening or reviewing it. The employee also asked the recipient to contact the employee to “discuss his or her actions.”

Silence ensued.

That’s when the bank sued Google to identify the recalcitrant recipient.

I am NO fan of Google, but if this bank thinks that suing Google for the identity of the email recipient is going to solve anything, they are nutso.

Let me get this straight: the employee EMAILED all this sensitive information?! :-O

Do you have any idea how many hands an email passes through to get to the recipient? Emails are NOT secure, not at all. I am appalled that Social Security numbers and bank account numbers are strewn across the Internet and FAX machines. Are the banks just BEGGING to be stolen from? I know that banks (and government bureaus) do this stuff all the time. So what! So the bank employee sent it to the wrong person. He never should have sent it AT ALL.