How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset · HackerPapers discussions

How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by shellac

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:43:42 GMT

'Anonymisation' schemes are a little like encryption, in that they just get monotonically weaker over time as people work out attacks. But the attacks tend to be much worse. I work in academic open data publishing, and the netflix prize (https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105) hangs over our heads. But what this illustrates to me is that researchers are just really careless, despite everything we make them agree to in data transfer agreements. It seems absurd to have little cubicles like this https://safepodnetwork.ac.uk/ (think Mission Impossible 1) but I do despair.

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by teraflop

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:17:54 GMT

We should have learned this lesson 20 years ago when researchers were able to deanonymize a lot of the Netflix Prize dataset, which contained nothing except movie ratings and their associated dates. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105 If movie ratings are vulnerable to pattern-matching from noisy external sources, then it should be obvious that location data is enormously more vulnerable.

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by godelski

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:10:26 GMT

> I'm telling you that Firefox is going to be out of business soon Do you not think everyone saying Firefox is going to be out of business soon plays a role in this? Regardless, I think you've ignored the root of my argument. I'm not trying to be a Firefox fanboy here but it's not like there's many options. The playing field is Chrome, Firefox, Safari. So only one of these is not "big tech". > Metrics can be transmitted without revealing the user. This is well known. This is not well known and I think you've kinda "told on yourself" here. It is fairly well known in the privacy community that…

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by ke88y

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 18:11:54 GMT

LOL. I'm not going to deanonymize datasets for an internet stranger. Certainly not for free, but also not at any hourly rate unless I know that the organization employing me either has the original non-anonymized dataset or at least have very strict internal controls about how deanonymized data will be handled. (I also haven't done this work in a LONG time, and there's now a whole lot of academic work on the topic that didn't exist back then, so there are probably much better consultants for legitimate organizations looking to hire for this work.) If you want proof, you can use google to find…

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by icebraining

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:33:55 GMT

In fact, this was demonstrated on Netflix's own dataset: https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by roninb

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 23:00:27 GMT

It didn't get published this year but I though Robust De-Anonymization of Large Datasets - http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0610105.pdf

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by indigoviolet

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 07:35:53 GMT

You're perhaps right. Of course, these people are on things like Facebook, Twitter and blogs and if you can narrow down age, gender, location and medical condition, you might be able to correlate with public posts. You can also look for specific people in there if you have certain kinds of prior information about them: For example, Aravind Narayanan was able to de-anonymize some part of the Netflix set [http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105]. Maybe that won't translate to this data.

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — mentioned by gaika

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:24:51 GMT

It is getting easy to break anonymous datasets with mining: Netflix: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105 AOL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/aol-this-was-a-screw-up...

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How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset — HN submission

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:48:58 GMT

How to Break Anonymity of the Netﬂix Prize Dataset (PDF)

4 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.