Is Netflix’s Next Contest a Privacy Time Bomb?

Just after finishing a contest to improve movie recommendations, Netflix is kicking off another competition to improve film suggestions based on demographics and geographics. But University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm says this is a “multi-million dollar privacy blunder” in the making. The second contest provides crowdsourced competitors with ages, genders, zip codes and genre ratings of subscribers. This data is anonymized, but in the first contest, it was proven that you could learn someone’s entire movie history based on the data if you new just a couple of their recently-watched films. Ohm says the new data makes it much easier to identify people’s movie habits and should be considered a “privacy breach.” So let’s get this out of the way: Last month, I rented the entire fifth season of Entourage, as well as Kite Runner, which I still haven’t watched. Eat that, Big Brother. [via Ars Technica]