Bank Data Not Viewed By Gmail User

Rocky Mountain Bank had accidentally leaked personal records of 1,300 customers.  The customers names, address, social security numbers where all part of the leaked records.  What happens is a Rocky Mountain Bank employee  attached the document containing 1,300 customers records then sent it to a mistyped gmail address.

Rocky Mountain Bank confronted Google and asked them to delete the email but they declined.  Then Rocky Mountain Bank went to court and received a court order for Google to delete the email and to disclose if it had been viewed.   Fortunately the email was never viewed so the data was not compromised.

Here is a little clip-it from a article reported by cnet

“Rocky Mountain Bank, working with Google (through court order), confirmed on Thursday of last week that the e-mail containing client information was never opened and has now been permanently destroyed by Google’s system,” Tina Martinez, general counsel for Rocky Mountain Capital, wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

“As a result, no customer data of any sort has been viewed or used by any inappropriate user during this data lapse,” Martinez wrote. “Rocky Mountain Bank acted to protect its customer’s confidential information. That objective was accomplished. The matter is now closed and the TRO (temporary restraining order) entered on September 23, 2009 is now vacated.”

Asked for comment, a Google spokesman said: “To protect the privacy of our users, we do not comment on their use of Google services.”

Looking at this I can understand why the user had never viewed email and attachment.  With so many scams always going on, I know personally would never open a email and an attachment if I was not expecting it.  Especially if it has a name of a bank on it.

Though looking at this I wonder how such incident like this could of happened in the first place?  Was it just complete carelessness.  I know after this if I were at that bank I would leave, that is just unacceptable for a bank or any business in that matter.