Privacy and the Internet have been hot topics over the past couple months. Yesterday a class action law suit was filed against Netflix for breaking privacy codes and releasing information about its users' preferences. In October, Netflix had a contest that offered $1 million to anybody who could come up with a way to improve its movie recommendation engine by 10%. Netflix opened the contest to the public and released data to participants about subscribers including political, sexual orientation and other sensitive information.
Researchers at the University of Texas published a paper "How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset" comparing ratings on Netflix with IMB. The lawsuit was filed by a group of individuals lead by a women who is only identified as a lesbian, who believe that now due to the exposure of this data, the idea that anyone who has the movie in their queue is more likely to be homosexual. This issues raises question of privacy issues and whether or not the data you submit is really anonymous or not.
Read Full Article: http://www.thresq.com/2009/12/facebook-netflix-privacy-complaint.html
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