The second Netflix prize is canceled due to privacy problems. I continue to believe my original assessment of this paper, that the privacy break was somewhat overstated. I still haven’t seen any serious privacy failures on the scale of the AOL search log release.
I expect privacy concerns to continue to be a big issue when dealing with data releases by companies or governments. The theory of maintaining privacy while using data is improving, but it is not yet in a state where the limits of what’s possible are clear let alone how to achieve these limits in a manner friendly to a prediction competition.
[...] Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: privacy | Leave a Comment Via John Langford, I learned that the sequel to the Netflix Prize has been cancelled due to privacy concerns. The [...]
One response to these kind of problems is to pull the data and require people to sign a form saying they will not try to re-identify individuals. When Homer et. al showed an attack on the genome-wide association study (GWAS), the NIH did this. Of course, this sort of defeats the purpose of Netflix’s experiment.