Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims

Re:Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit C... by jpwagner on Thursday December 17, 2009 @06:45PM (#1002208)

Summary: a woman wrote something like this...http://bit.ly/8BLUAw (describing her sexual orientation in an "anonymous" (imdb) forum), and then, based on her other reviews and data in the Netflix contest, a couple of hackers (security/privacy researchers) put 2 + 2 together to find out her identity (not their intended purpose, but as a side effect.) She blames Netflix.

I'm actually unclear as to who's right and wrong here. Clearly, it seems unjust that she unknowingly outed herself, but how responsible is she of her online personas? I also wouldn't be surprised if Netflix has something in their ToS relating to this kind of "anonymous" release of information.

This is a complicated scenario.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit C... by notauser on Friday December 18, 2009 @04:06AM (#1002829)

I think the responsibility does rest with Netflix, because it's almost outside the control of one person to keep identities separate these days. Every bit of information released vastly increases the chance of identification.

To given an example - let's say Google as part of a new anti-fraud service released an MD5 hash of every e-mail address with a Google account, plus a MD5 hash of every IP that account had been successfully logged in from.

Sounds fairly anonymous - except that every website owner would now be able to match up every duplicate-but-separate account in their database to find out who had two or more identities, even if the user had been careful to use two separate machines for that specific site.

[ Parent | on HN ]