I heard from a friend that Prodigy was scanning user's hard drives. Basically, when you logged on Prodigy made a complete directory of your hard drive and uploaded it. Prodigy was using this to find out what applications you used so they could direct the appropriate advertising towards you. Apparently, they're suffering several lawsuits now because of it.

This tale has been around for a while. Prodigy makes a huge file, over 1 MB, on your hard drive and stores information there to speed up the data transfer. People started finding bits of their files in there. They claimed that Prodigy was snooping into their systems. Prodigy denied it and claimed that their software just didn't bother to clear the disk space when it allocated it, so whatever was there, stayed there until the space was used. They distributed a utility which would zero out that information. Whether they were really snooping or not, who knows? If they were, they were pretty stupid to leave clear text in the file.

My friend heard this on the trailing end of a radio talk show. If it was really happening, it sounds horrible. Could Secure Drive be set up to stop this kind of attack?

Secure Drive would stop it if you weren't logged into the encrypted drive when you ran Prodigy. Of course, if you were logged in and they knew about Secure Drive, they could get your encryption key as well as your data... --- Mike