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Comment by pbh | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that any data at all will necessarily reduce the entropy of the probability distribution of members' preferences, likes, dislikes, habits, and so on (i.e., their privacy). The authors seem to brush off the "greater good" argument here, but I don't understand how any large scale data release can happen without at least some reference to such an argument given that context. Given that, the authors seem to be making a fairly strong claim here: that no large scale "anonymised" data release should ever happen. Is that helping anyone in the context of movie viewing? And is it hurting anyone other than academic researchers, given that companies share more sensitive data anyway?

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The authors mentioned two alternatives to the current form of large-scale release. First, opt-in. Second, contestants submit programs that run on the anonymized data but the contestants do not have access to the data itself. Could either of these approaches contribute to the greater good without compromising privacy?

I do not have any data regarding opt-in, but my impression was that as a rule, no one opts-in, and no one opts-out of basically anything (excepting the notorious cases, e.g., Real Player). If it worked, and somehow gave an at least somewhat unbiased sampling of the data, opt-in would obviously be best.

I am completely unsatisfied with the submit-and-run model. Feature engineering seems to rely on knowing your data really intimately, and that does not seem possible in a submit-and-run model.

What happened with Real Player?

The Real Player installer, over the course of maybe five to ten years, was so pushy about installing extra, unwanted software and sending private data that it garnered a reputation that caused people to be really careful when installing it, if they installed it at all. It is not really a perfect example for people actually opting-out, because I think one of the many criticisms was that it was often either not possible or extremely difficult to determine how to opt-out of its features (sending titles of files being played, annoying message center and ad popups, packaged additional software). That said, check out the Wikipedia page for further details.

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