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Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!caen!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,alt.privacy,alt.censorship
Subject: Re: Prodigy charged with invading users' privacy (was Re: Lifestyle Information ( was Re: Safeway Stores to Accept Charge)
Message-ID: <1991May02.191425.2458@looking.on.ca>
Date: 2 May 91 19:14:25 GMT
References: <1991Apr30.185752.4913@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> <1991May01.024205.13181@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <1991May1.210740.19958@cec1.wustl.edu> <1991May2.153535.6759@athena.mit.edu>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 20

Folks, this is silly.  People are claiming they found their desk calendars
or bits of old source code in the stage.dat file.

Do you realize how clever the software would have to be to search your files
for "interesting" data, upload it, and then, at the other end, process it
along with 100,000 users' other "interesting file"

And that if they were doing this, they would put it in the stage.dat file,
which is a file used for caching material sent from Prodigy to you -- stuff
it wants to access more than once.  Why store stuff you want to access only
once in a cache?    Particularly if you were planning something sneakly like
this?

They're not that smart, and they're not that stupid.

Can anybody confirm a case of a pure flopping installation that got
fragments of stuff from hard disk files in it?   I have heard reports of
this, and that would indeed be odd.  The rest sounds like paranoia.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473