Days later she returned and bought a new laptop and a two-terabyte external hard drive, which she asked to be loaded with her recovered files. But the external hard drive contained 131,000 images, some sensitive, and none of her old files. One of the images was a Harvey Norman ad. Other photos, seen by Fairfax Media, were of a baby being washed, a nude woman on a bed, a child blowing out candles on a third-birthday cake and a 2010 Loyola College class photo. One of the photos was of the family of Ms Cumming's friend, Sandra Cain, who lives nearby. Ms Cain, 39, visited the same Harvey Norman store earlier this year and inserted a camera memory card into a photo-developing machine. She does not remember developing the photo seen by Ms Cumming.

Ms Cumming did not return the images because of privacy concerns but store founder and chairman Gerry Harvey said the company wanted to get to the bottom of the incident and needed the images to cross-reference them. ''We do millions of these things every year and I've never come across this problem,'' Mr Harvey said. ''It's obviously some … human error.'' After Fairfax reports last year that used hard drives had been reportedly resold as new at Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi stores, Harvey Norman said it would contact franchisees to ''remind'' them that they must adhere to the law. Ms Cumming is considering complaining to the federal Privacy Commissioner and said she was relieved the photos did not fall into the wrong hands. ''There is a little boy in some of the photos - as parents you do take photos of your children running around nudie,'' she said. ''And I'm an innocent person but there are non-innocent people out there who, if they got hold of that photo, would have a field day.''

Each store's Fuji photo kiosk is connected to a server, which stores photos and is overwritten every five days. Harvey Norman compliance officer Michael Mecham said it was ''verging on impossible'' that the photos had moved from the photo kiosk to other computers in the store, because they were not part of the same network. IT expert Malcolm Mitchell, who later recovered Ms Cumming's data, agreed. Mr Mitchell said Harvey Norman had likely recovered someone else's files and copied them onto Ms Cumming's hard drive by mistake. Under this theory, Ms Cain's photo would have been there by chance. But Ms Cain said no one had tried to recover data from her computer at Harvey Norman since the photo was taken last year. Harvey Norman compliance officer Marylyn Prekop told Ms Cumming in an email yesterday that her broken laptop must have contained the 131,000 photos, and the company could not ''say with any certainty that a breach of privacy has occurred''. But Ms Cumming said if the photos were inadvertently on her old laptop she would have also received her own files on the new hard drive. The Age has launched a series on privacy and wants to hear from you.

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