[filmgirlcw]

They had a $1 million prize for improving the recommendation algorithm. The data was anonymized and sanitized but it was apparently potentially possible to identify people from some of the data. A closeted-lesbian mother filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix (even though I do not think she was actually outed by the dataset, meaning I do not think anyone ever connected her rental history to her) on the basis that offering the dataset to researchers at all was a violation of US privacy laws over video rental records. The argument was that someone looking at her video rental records could deduce that she was actually gay.

It might be surprising given how lax the US seems to be about privacy in general, but video rental records are protected differently from some other data because of the failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (failed in part because reporters were able to get his video rental records whichI think show he had rented porn, but I don't remember all the details). As a result of the Bork situation, federal law was passed to protect video rental records. Facebook had to settle a thing with the FTC over something similar with its Beacon program.

Netflix wound up canceling the follow-up contest because of the class-action lawsuit. IIRC, a few years later they wound up settling a different lawsuit also related to the FTC stuff, but that wasn't tied to the algorithm or potentially "outing" anyone.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2009/12/netflix-privacy-lawsuit/

[mehlmao]

Bork's VHS rentals were actually pretty boring and didn't include pornography. The indignation / backlash to the list's publication made it clear that he and his supporters were hypocrites; Bork had repeatedly argued and ruled in a way to curtail privacy rights.

I recommend reading The Bork Tapes Saga when you get a chance: https://web.archive.org/web/20071009144531/http://www.theame...

The Video Privacy Protection Act should be expanded to include all PII.

[downWidOutaFite]

That lawsuit killed the contest but the recommendation system went on for a while longer until they realized their streaming service didn't have enough content for the original recommendation algorithm to work and they wanted to promote their own stuff.

[ComputerGuru]

Afaict the current algorithm is something like this:

if is_netflix_show() { return 0.95 + rand(0.00, 0.05) } else { hide_rating() }

[WalterBright]

I thought it was Clarence Thomas that was attacked over his porn rentals.

[seattle_spring]

Clarence Thomas has a way, way more sordid "fetish" history than just renting porn. No normal person would care if it was just him renting an erotic video.