Banking

A sensitive e-mail mistakenly sent by a bank to a Gmail address that prompted a court to order Google to deactivate the account was not viewed by the recipient and has been deleted, the bank said on Tuesday.

The e-mail, sent by an employee of Jackson, Wyo.-based Rocky Mountain Bank on August 12, contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and loan information of more than 1,300 bank customers.

The bank sent another e-mail asking that the data be destroyed and went to court to get Google to intervene on its behalf. Last week, a judge in U.S. … Read more

Online money-saving tool BillShrink launched on Tuesday a new Savings and CDs feature designed to help people find the highest interest rates.

BillShrink, which also offers help on finding cheaper cell phone plans, more advantageous credit cards, and low gas prices, told me in a conference call Monday that it's on track to help users save more than $1 billion by year's end across all three of its money-saving features.

With its Savings and CDs tool, BillShrink now enables people to take the cash they've saved and invest it in a savings account or a certificate of … Read more

A bank that accidentally sent sensitive customer information to a Gmail address and persuaded a judge to order Google to deactivate the account has resolved the issue with Google and the companies have filed a motion to dismiss the case.

Google spokesman Andrew Pederson declined to say exactly how the issue was resolved or to identify the owner of the Gmail account.

The problem began August 12 when a worker at Rocky Mountain Bank inadvertently sent an e-mail containing names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a random Gmail address. When the … Read more

This week, I'm joined by CNET security expert Elinor Mills in a discussion with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer, whose personal finance site is being acquired by Intuit. We grill Patzer on why he sold the company, the future of Quicken, and the security of online financial data.

I really enjoyed recording this podcast. We had the start-up CEO of the moment in to talk about why he sold his personal finance company, Mint, to Intuit--the company he built Mint to compete with in the first place.

Also, Elinor grills Patzer on the security safeguards in his system. Patzer tells us getting access to Mint data is like initiating self-destruct on the Starship Enterprise: You need three people to give their individual passwords at the same time or no go. Play the podcast for the full content, and for our show notes, including some bonus content from a post-show discussion, keep reading. … Read more

On Tuesday PNC Financial Services Group unveiled what it claims to be the "largest green wall in North America."

Certainly, the wall is taller and "greener" than Fenway Park's famous 37-foot-high Green Monster in Boston.

The PNC wall is a living, breathing wall of plants spanning 2,380 square feet on the south side of the bank's Pittsburgh headquarters, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Wood Street. The wall is made up of 602 two-foot square panels. Each panel contains 24 evergreen plants.

"The vertical garden, similar to a green roof, will … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of … Read more

In the year since the worst financial meltdown in modern history, many financial institutions are still seeking to identify the root causes of the crisis and develop new ways to re-invent their business processes to ensure that such an event can never occur again.

In addition to human error, over-reaching risk, and simple greed, there was a key technology component that has been overlooked by most reports. According to Bob Picciano, General Manager of IBM Lotus Software and IBM Collaboration, this technological fault was made up of two elements; the lack of corporate-wide computer program integration at most banks, and … Read more

I expected problems from my attempt to rid myself of the paper in my life. What I didn't expect was this complication from my wailing 4-year-old son, Levi:

"Daddy, why did you recycle all my pictures?"

Even though he raised that question in a half-asleep moment in the middle of the night last week, Levi's anxiety illustrated one big complication about the idea of going paperless.

In short, some physical objects have value that doesn't easily transfer to the bits of their electronic representation. There's a great divide between the physical and the virtual. … Read more

ID Vault is an incredibly useful program that helps users keep their personal information secure while managing their usernames and passwords. While we'd like to see the program deal with browsers a little more smoothly, overall we were quite impressed with it.

The program's interface is sleek and intuitive. The program includes its own browser, and to start, users simply navigate to a Web site that they would typically sign in to, such as their bank, and enter their username and password. ID Vault will then show a prompt asking if the user successfully logged in; if so, … Read more