"True, Netflix plans to release age not birthdate, but simple arithmetic shows that for many people in the country, gender plus ZIP code plus age will narrow their private movie preferences down to at most a few hundred people. "Researchers have known for more than a decade that gender plus ZIP code plus birthdate uniquely identifies a significant percentage of Americans," he wrote in a blog entry. Given the tremendous advances in "reidentification" technology over the last few years, Ohm argues that the release of so much new data should actually constitute a "privacy breach." Ohm has worried for years about privacy breaches, and his newest paper argues that "anonymizing" data doesn't actually keep data anonymous. That has law professor Paul Ohm seeing a bright Netflix red. Gender, ZIP Codes, ages, genre ratings, and more will be released in a data set with more than 100 million entries.
If your information appeared in the first data set, someone knowing a bit about your movie preferences could figure out the complete set of movies that you rated on Netflix-an information leak that would certainly not please all users.įor the Netflix Prize 2, the company is releasing even more information, despite the security weaknesses of the first data set.
The Netflix data set released for use with the first prize was supposedly "anonymized," but security researchers found a way to link the anonymous movie recommendations with data from other sites in order to identify individual Netflix users. Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt then announced a sequel, the Netflix Prize 2, but one law professor is already calling the new contest a "multi-million dollar privacy blunder."
Netflix yesterday passed out a $1 million check to the stats geeks of "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos," the team which won the Netflix Prize by improving on the company's algorithms for picking the movies that Netflix subscribers might like to watch next.
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