An unnamed Gmail user—let’s call him Bob—did just the right thing when he received an email from the Rocky Mountain Bank of Wyoming, a bank he’d never heard of: suspecting they were phishing attempts or spam, he deleted the email without opening it.

Someone at the bank accidentally sent Bob the account information of 1,300 customers. Once the error was discovered, the bank tried to contact Bob by sending more emails, and again, Bob deleted them.

Imagine Bob’s surprise the day he received a message from Google saying, “Per court order in a case brought by a Wyoming-based bank, your Gmail account has been disabled and your account information provided to the bank.”

So that’s the second lesson we all need to learn: cloud computing can be seriously risky. Imagine what would happen to a business that uses Google for email, contacts, calendars, chats, Wave and AdSense. Because of someone else’s error, that business could be immediately rendered dead in the water.

One of the greatest ironies of the Bob debacle is that shutting down his Gmail account didn’t do a thing to protect the accountholders; if Bob wanted to use the information maliciously, he surely would have already done so, or at least printed or copied the information. And there are other email providers Bob could have used to spread the information around.