We have all been through it once or twice, accidentally tap send on a text or email only to figure out seconds later that you have made some grave mistake. That’s exactly what happened with a contractor working for infamous investment firm Goldman Sachs who wrongly sent an email containing “highly confidential brokerage account information” to an unconcerned recipient. In the spirit of damage control Goldman has taken Google to court in order to obtain a court order that forces it to delete that email from the recipient’s account.
The contractor was supposed to send the email to a “@gs.com” address instead it was sent to a “@gmail.com account.” The former is quite obviously associated with Goldman Sachs, the latter is a free email service with hundreds of millions of users.
Attempts to contact the account holder failed which is when Goldman decided to take Google to court and request a judge to order it to track down the recipient and delete the email. Goldman says in its complaint that this would help avert a “needless and massive” privacy breach even though it didn’t reveal how many of its clients, which includes big corporations and high net-worth individuals, would be affected if the data were to end up in the public.
The complaint also reads that Google’s team has informed them that the company can’t delete the email without being presented with a court order, which will also absolve Google from any liability and maybe from dealing with people who would want the same courtesy extended to them.