Creeva’s World 2.0

My pre­vi­ous post about Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies intel­li­gence sort­ing tool brought up the fact that they used netflix’s data as part of their dataset analy­sis. Fur­ther research shows that net­flix rou­tinely releases their full dataset with the user’s pri­vate infor­ma­tion scrubbed. So for a brief minute here Net­flix is in the clear. This goes on fur­ther though from issues that have been dis­cov­ered about this. Net­flix didn’t stay clear very long.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov from The Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin on Novem­ber 11, 2006 released a paper on how to break the anonymity of the Net­flix dataset. This infor­ma­tion is aggre­gate and the method is quite com­plex. There is how­ever the fact that this data can be found and linked back to you with the cor­rect tools. Palan­tir releases tools for the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and hav­ing tested it I have no con­fir­ma­tion but since it’s pub­lic data at this point has no rea­son not to include it in their sam­ple data set they pro­vide to costumers.

Before I go fur­ther I would like to say I don’t think Palan­tir has done any­thing wrong. The prob­lem is that Net­flix has released this data to the pub­lic even after they learned that the anonymity can be bro­ken. With Palantir’s strengths there is very lit­tle effort to link these rentals to you in your pri­vate records. Now I will be the first to dis­miss gov­ern­ment para­noia but in this case with such lit­tle effort would the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity really pass up this infor­ma­tion? Data by itself is mean­ing­less, but data in aggre­gate can be very powerful.

If you are con­cerned with the gov­ern­ment or any­one else track­ing your rental his­tory I would sug­gest leav­ing net­flix as soon as possible.