Financial services company Goldman Sachs has requested that Google delete a sensitive email sent by one of its employees to an unknown Gmail account.
Google has already blocked the email that is said to include sensitive client information after a court order was issued, but Goldman Sachs is now demanding the email is deleted.
The Gmail user is said not to have accessed their account since the ordeal, but Goldman Sachs wants it removed nonetheless in an unprecedented request to 'unsend' an email.
Emergency relief is necessary to avoid the risk of inflicting a needless and massive privacy violation upon Goldman Sachs's clients.
A spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs said: "Google has also told us the email account in question had not been accessed from the time that email was sent and Google blocked it."
The email was sent on 23 June by an outside consultant and was in relation to an internal matter while the consultant was testing changes to the financial company's internal reporting and validation process. The consultant was told to send the test to an internal email address but sent it to a gmail.com domain address instead of gs.com by mistake.
The investment bank wrote in its filing: "Emergency relief is necessary to avoid the risk of inflicting a needless and massive privacy violation upon Goldman Sachs's clients, and to avoid the risk of unnecessary reputational damage to Goldman Sachs."
However, Goldman Sachs needs to get a pursuant order, also issued by the courts, to get the email deleted from Google's server, according to Google's incident report team to whom the request was sent.
The recipient has yet to respond to Google, and Goldman Sachs hasn't yet revealed how many of its clients would be affected should the information leak.
