If these people were concerned about accuracy and getting things right, why make the variables private at all? Make them public and have your internal team work

If these people were concerned about accuracy and getting things right, why make the variables private at all? Make them public and have your internal team work on the problem (instead of strangers). That way someone with domain expertise can see those variables really are important fundamentally, and add them as features. It’s akin to someone giving you a bunch of anonymous variables to predict stock prices. You would throw out irrelevant variables like the fog level that day, or moon cycles of course. But you would never know if they were anonymous variables. thus you would blindly feed in garbage in your models. Are you concerned about accuracy or privacy? You really can’t have it both ways, imo.