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From: jrbd@craycos.com (James Davies)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy,alt.censorship
Subject: Re: Prodigy charged with invading users' privacy
Message-ID: <1991Apr30.225133.8165@craycos.com>
Date: 30 Apr 91 22:51:33 GMT
References: <1991Apr30.185752.4913@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
Organization: Cray Computer Corporation
Lines: 13

>     I received a call from someone from another user group who read
>our newsletter and is very involved in telecommunications.  He
>installed and ran Prodigy on a freshly formatted 3.5 inch 1.44 meg
>disk. Sure enough, upon checking STAGE.DAT he discovered personal data
>from his hard disk that could not have been left there after an
>erasure.

Question: was he using an unused disk, or did he just reformat an old
one, assuming that it would be wiped clean?

Could some Prodigy user out there try this experiment again, this
time using a verifiably empty disk?  I get the feeling that this hasn't
exactly been a controlled experiment so far...