As for that part of the FAQ, it is intended as an explanation of some of the theorems proved in the paper and is a response to some of the theoretical objections we face from the data privacy community. It is not an issue that arises in practice.
Instead, you brushed off our claims, calling them “absolutely without merit,” among other things.
Now even if you are all emotionless, 100% objective researchers with no interest other than the greater good, this very sentence will make it impossible for humans to read your letter without implying a certain level of snark.
If you want to project pure motives for the letter then it would have been best to leave their reaction to your original research out of it, or, probably more appropriately, don't publish an open letter at all—contact them directly.
Analysis of motives is of course valuable. But it's not an argument against the matter at hand. It may not have been clear that I was being facetious.
I don't think anyone is refusing to accept anything he says. They're just disapproving of his motives, which is fine.
Still, if you can overlook my misreading, I would love your response. I understand that the example from the FAQ is not central to your argument, but I do think it's important in understanding your worldview. If I provide a tool that can be used, erroneously or not, to create or enable prejudice, at what point have I crossed the line into 'violation of privacy'?
That FAQ question is a big red herring. Some of the objections to our paper during peer-review were along the lines of "if Netflix had esentially duplicated every record in the database, how could you be sure you found the right record? What does right record even mean?" No really, it was that silly. So it was meant to be a way to justify the fact that de-anonymization can happen even if you didn't find "the right record."
In other words, "we showed them!" -- seem an awful lot like gloating to me.
It also doesn't appear that you ever seriously considered the "greater good" argument, beyond asserting that it's "dangerous." This leaves me with the suspicion that you chose to take the easy way out instead of weighting the actual costs and benefits of what you were doing.
You're shooting the messenger here. If a dataset can be de-anonymized, it's better to know that and be able to make informed decisions.
As for the possibility of netflix running a contest like this in an online fashion, well, maybe, but the benefits of having access to the data are enormous, plus you've now moved to a model where only the privileged few are allowed access via NDA, or Netflix has to provide computing resources to all researchers, etc. I don't see it happening.
- Do you view this as a breach of privacy?
- What do you consider private?
- Do you view this as a breach of privacy, but just
don't care?
- Do you feel that the utility of the data out-weighs
the privacy concerns?
- What about the people that view this as an invasion
of privacy and have their Netflix user data in that
set? Should they be thrown under the bus in the pursuit
of progress because *you* feel that the data has more
utility than the privacy concerns do?
Also, you're a retard for comparing movie predictions, and the possibility of matching a person to their movie viewing history, as even remotely comparable to human test subjects. Please.
As for invasion of privacy, I'm unsure -- I'm not sure of the probability of matching, the quantity of information necessary to get a good, for various values of good, match, etc. What is clear is the authors had a major hand in stifling a nontrivial nonacademic dataset and damaging the community around it. They further have aided the lawyers suing netflix, and have helped poison the well for any company in the future that decides they might want to do something like this. So I say congratulations! For the author to pretend this didn't happen as a result of his actions is disingenuous.
As for your questions, well, they're just stupid. We live in a world where the fbi/police get access to your PHYSICAL LOCATION 24x7 without a warrant just by asking, where your emails and telephone calls are scanned by the nsa with plans to open this data set to the police at large, where google/yahoo/et al see turning your emails and access patterns over to the police as a revenue opportunity, etc. If you care about privacy, this is such small potatoes as to be a waste of time. BTW, anyone can still spend roughly $100 to access your phone call history. G has, in subpoenable form, your entire search history -- and don't think that clearing cookies prevents stapling that history together.
So you're saying that since government agencies have access to a lot of my private information, I shouldn't care about any of my private information remaining private? Sounds like you're creating a false dichotomy. You're presenting things as if you can only care about all of your private data or none of your private data; since the government has access to large portions of your private data and you don't have much (or any) control over that, you should therefore care about none of your private data. Isn't it possible for me to care about all of my private data, but to choose the battles that I fight?