I'm not actually sure it was ethical doing this research on a set of users who had no desire to be de-anonymized. While the data was out there, and anything you

I'm not actually sure it was ethical doing this research on a set of users who had no desire to be de-anonymized. While the data was out there, and anything you came up with on other data could certainly have been used to de-anonymize the netflix data, specifically connecting the two seems like a mistake. In fact in using this dataset you've kind of done exactly what you set out to stop - used peoples data in ways they haven't consented to.