Sometime in the middle of August, Rocky Mountain Bank set names, addresses, Social Security numbers and loan information of over 1,300 of its customers to a Gmail address, obviously by mistake. When the bank realized what it had done, it sent another email to the same address asking the recipient to contact the bank and delete the file without reading it. The recipient did not answer, and the bank asked Google for contact information on the recipient.
Following its privacy procedures, Google told Rocky Mountain that it needed a court order. The bank went to Northern District (San Jose) Judge James Ware, who not only ordered disclosure, but also -- this is where it gets strange -- deactivated the recipient's account. Yes, you read correctly: shut down this poor person's email account. This happened on Wednesday, September 23.
Mind you, the recipient had done nothing wrong. He or she had no duty to contact the bank, and nobody even knows if the information was ever received, as it is highly likely the unsolicited emails went straight into the junk folder.
The weirdness doesn't stop there. This week Google and the bank went back into court saying that the original request was now "moot," and asking that Google be allowed to reinstate the poor user's account. Instead, Judge Ware continued the case until October 5, leaving the user without email for another week.
What is going on here? First, who is protecting the user's rights? Second, what made the bank think that everything would be okay if the user had replied, saying the file was deleted? Third, why didn't Judge Ware order the account re-activated? Fourth, why did he de-activate it in the first place? Something is really wrong here, and unfortunately the person getting hurt is a totally innocent Gmail user.
Read more at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=114347.

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