Bank demands through court that Google removes incorrectly sent mail – update

The American bank Goldman Sachs wants to force Google to delete an email message through a court of law. The bank accidentally sent sensitive customer data to a Gmail address instead of the intended Gs.com account.

The email was sent on June 23 by an employee hired by Goldman Sachs, according to Reuters, and contained “highly confidential information about brokerage accounts,” the bank said. It is not known how many customers are involved. The mail should actually be sent to an address with gs.com as an extension, but it happened to a Gmail address by mistake.

The recipient did not respond to reports from the bank. Goldman Sachs then contacted Google, but the search giant’s incident response team said it would only proceed with the removal if there was a court order on the table.

According to Goldman Sachs, there is a threat of reputational damage and an “unnecessary and massive privacy breach,” while Google would only face some “inconvenience” from intercepting the single message that was “obviously misdirected.”

There are still few examples where Google was asked to remove messages from Gmail. The company is likely to refer parties with such requests to court to prevent this from happening too often. Google is already confronted in Europe with demands from parties to be removed from the search results. This ‘right to be forgotten’ came into effect following a ruling by the European Court of Justice.

Update, 9 pm: Google has deleted the mail according to Goldman Sachs, Business Insider writes.