Goldman Sachs demands that Google "unsend" a fatfingered email to avoid "reputational damage"

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Well hopefully Google charges them a nice fat fee for their services.

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This is one of those canary in the mineshaft court cases. It is pretty rare for the canary or the miners to survive anymore, the capture is nearly complete.

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"Hello, yes, is this the local power plant? I’d like to register a complaint.

This afternoon, I was heating my teapot on my electric stove top, and my hand slipped and touched the hot burner. As you can imagine it was quite painful and embarassing. Hence why I’m contacting you - I’d like you to retroactively reverse the flow of electricity to the stove for the duration of that event, in order to undo the damage."

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Hello, yes, is this the Acme Cat-in-Bag factory?

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Alas, I don’t think I’ll ever have the economic clout to get courts to pressure people to undo my mistakes…

ETA: Don’t GS have the traditional “this is confidential, if you’re not the intended reader don’t read or send this to everyone” footers? I don’t know if there’s any legal weight to those

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Someone did something similar at work once. Essentially some confidential report got spammed to the entire company, when it should have only gone to a select few. I (and I suspect a great many others) deleted it unread like many of the other “helpful” updates I get spammed at work. Only when a follow up email that said, “Please delete my previous email unread.” did I dig through the trash and then read that email. And you know what? It was one of the more boring and uninteresting emails I had read. No sex. No violence. No actionable intelligence.

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well nothing in my in-box

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They are correct. Any “reputation damage” they get out of this is totally unnecessary (since their reputation is already in the toilet)

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And right now someone is busy registering first.last@gmail.com for every employee name of GS they can get their hands on.

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Judges can give do overs? I did not know that.

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And thus was born the Judge-Spacetime Continuum.

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You realise that all those abandoned canaries are breeding down there in the darkness? One day their enraged mutant descendents will find their way back to the surface and it will be CANAROGEDDON.

Don’t start me on the predictable consequences of breeding a race of frogs who can survive being slowly boiled.

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Those are FINRA regulations, not FIRA. And I wonder if Barbara Streisand was on the to: list?

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Hi Google, we fucked up, so we demand that you clean up our mess. SIgned: The Sociopath Too Big To Fail Highschool Bully Society

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Those are an excellent signal that whatever above them is worth either deleting immediately (most of the time) or forwarding to wikileaks (rare occasions, when the blowhard using it isn’t mere self-important); but my understanding is that they are pure fluff.

Just writing that doesn’t establish any contractual obligation, in the absence of an actual agreement, and any information enjoying special legal protections without an agreement likely doesn’t need the silly disclaimer.

I wouldn’t want to be in the line of fire of somebody with an unlimited lawyer budget on the subject, since you don’t need much of a case to be able to tie an opponent up and bleed them dry on pure procedure; but the same would be true of being in the line of fire without the ghastly little meme-signature thing.

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This has happened before: Rocky Mountain Bank vs. Google.

And you can see both sides…one the one hand, if my bank accidentally sends confidential financial information about me to a random Gmail user, yes, I’d like Google to delete that. OTOH, some random user shouldn’t have his account frozen as happened in the Rocky Mountain case because of a bank’s incompetency.

I would think a reasonable solution would be legislation allowing this where the data accidentally sent is protected/confidential, but requiring that the sending party have to pay a fine to the receiving party. I think $100k would be reasonable.

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“unnecessary reputational damage”

They messed up in a big way. The damage to their reputation is necessary. It’s called taking responsibility for your actions. Corporations ARE people, my friend. And they are about 6 years old growing up with very little discipline.

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I’m told that Toni Braxton has also been contacted and directed to unbreak the hearts of unspecified Goldman Sachs board members.

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if they can unring a bell, they get this sound of one hand clapping:

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