Netflix Not Anonymous As Once Thought

By Lashan Clarke

Since the end of last year, and the beginning of 2008, numerous tales of internet security breaches have flooded the news. In an interesting report from two university, it seems it is now possible to track people using movie ratings, and the movies they rent online.

Similar to the way a social security or national insurance number can identify someone, a student and professor at the University of Texas Austin - Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, respectively. Using a technique developed in the Department of Computer Sciences at the university, they were able to identify at least two people who rented from Netflix last year.

The information was obtained from a generic database for the $1 million contest put on by Netflix. University student Shmatikov had this to say, “Releasing the data and just removing the names does nothing for privacy. If you know their name and a few records, then you can identify that person in the other (private) database, he stated.