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Re:Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit C... by pyre on Thursday December 17, 2009 @08:47PM (#1002392)
> I actually saw this lady at a bar once kissing another woman. But I had no idea she was a lesbian until I wrote a deanonymizer on a dataset of millions of rows and then combed through her IMDB posts to find one very suggestive comment.

The issue is really whether or not 'everyone' will know that she is a lesbian (really bisexual if read her IMDB comment which someone posted above). I highly doubt that someone wanting to conceal her identity as a lesbian/bisexual woman would go to a 'straight bar' and start making out with a woman. So the presumption here would be that you saw her at a gay bar kissing a woman. If so, not too many 'anti-gay' people go to gay bars, so I would think that she is relatively safe from discrimination in such a scenario.

> Netflix should have asked for permission before releasing a user's anonymized data. But I think they learned their lessons.

Obviously not because Netflix's second contest will release even more information on users (like zip/postal code, age, etc). Does that sound like someone that has 'learned their lesson?'

While the first contest could be put down to good faith, the second one definitely shows them at least attempting to push the boundaries.

Re:Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit C... by breck on Thursday December 17, 2009 @10:26PM (#1002489)
On your first point, I was making a (bad) joke.

On your second point:

Did they ask permission or set their TOS appropriately in the second contest?

I don't think the problem is releasing the data, the problem is not asking for users' permission first.