The judge is obviously trying to protect those 1300 innocent people, who's only wrongdoing was to choose a bank run by complete *****s... But still, that does not excuse the judge from tramping all over privacy rights and trying to create precedents that would have massively negative ramifications on the entire internet privacy world... And I'm sure it will become some huge knock-down drag-out legal battle very quickly.
I think Google should turn around and counter-sue the bank in a class action suit on behalf of the customers who had their information wrongly emailed outside of the bank. I'm sure they could find a way to make the bank actually take responsibility for their actions. They could at least sue for negligence, violation of privacy acts, or just being stupid without a license maybe.

Encryption

Encryption, Encryption, Encryption.

Any email sent out is to be considered open to prying eyes...no email is safe. So why didn't the bank encrypt such sensitive information before sending it out?

The employee or manager or both are both incompetent and have no clue about technology. They need to take another look at their protocols because if I was their customer I'd sue them and then close my account immediately.

I had a doubtful pleasure to work with one the the UK's biggest consumer banks. They were running a mailing campaign which involved sending us the list of their customers. The list included a lot of sensitive details and the way this bank's security personnel initially proposed to send the data went a bit like this:

- we'll send the password protected spreadsheet in one email and the password (which was going to be different every time) in another email - for security reasons.

I must say that the idiocy of this bank's security person has almost knocked me unconscious.. I've refused to work with security illiterate people..

For some reason the biggest IT morons happen to work in banks... I'm not saying that there are no smart people there. I just haven't come across many of them..

@Judaz-- The fact that the email was sent to a gmail account does not mean that the computer it was sent from was connected to the internet. The bank could have been using outlook through an exchange server, and sent to the gmail address. Yes, the bank should not be sending confidential information unencrypted, especially to an offsite unsecure email account. Yes, the bank is being operated by the technologicly illiterate, but no, the computer did not have to have internet access to send the email.

absolutely absurd