Divulging employee personal information?

If a manager shares with his entire team certain personal information (extremely poor driving record) about a job applicant that is subsequently hired, is this allowed? This occurred in my workplace and several of the team members are extremely uncomfortable with this information. It is not relevant to the job performed and colors the opinion of the team towards this new team member. I confronted the manager about this and the reaction was "so what." I then took it to HR and feel that now I am being retaliated against because of this. Please help.