ABSTRACT
In April 1990, Lotus Development Corporation announced a product called MarketPlace: Households. MarketPlace was to be a direct mail marketing database for Macintosh computers and would contain name, address, and spending habit information on 120 million individual American consumers. After MarketPlace was announced, computer privacy advocates began investigating the product. Although most of the data contained in MarketPlace were already available (data were provided by Equifax, the second largest credit reporting agency in the United States), privacy advocates felt that MarketPlace went far beyond current standards for privacy protection.
