Yes, really: Judge orders GMail account closed because user received unsolicited e-mail

Use your GMail account for everything?

If you do, this story will make you seriously uneasy. (And it’s not GMail’s fault.) This is a scary and dangerous precedent, and it could happen to any of us that use and love GMail, if it’s allowed to stand. A GMail user (like Joe You) received a random, mis-addressed e-mail from a bank employee. And because said user had the audacity to have a working e-mail address, his ass is being hauled into court:

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.

If this guy (or girl) was going to do something nefarious, they could or even would have done so immediately. (The breach was August 12th of this year.) Downloaded the information to a thumb drive, sold it on the black market, made wallpaper out of it… the point is that the data was sent out into the internet ether, and you can’t unring a bell. It’s the risk one takes when stupidly sending a sensitive file to a GMail address. But the scary part was not that the man ended up inadvertently in possession of the data- it’s what happened afterwards.

The bank responsible for the whole mess, the Rocky Mountain Bank, sued Google to reveal the user’s identity (pointless) and “deactivate” the user’s account. (Doubly pointless.) If the user was going to sell or otherwise share the information, he’d have done it already. Scarier still? The judge in the case granted it. So now this person, who committed the unthinkable crime of receiving an e-mail not intended for them, stands to lose all their work contacts, all their personal contacts, sentimental emails, actual work for work…

What do you store in your e-mail for reference? How screwed would you be if your GMail account was deactivated? And how could a decision like this stand in court when the actions approved by the judge clearly will do nothing to ensure the safety of the data, while managing to trample all over a person’s individual right to intellectual property? Does that only count if the intellectual property is owned by a corporation? And where does it stop? Can your computer be seized, too, if the wrong e-mail falls into your hands? After all, you could have saved the file.

[Via Consumerist]