Netflix had to pull the dataset after a researchers at U Texas were able to de-anonymize the dataset, shown in their paper Robust De-anonymization of Large Spar

Netflix had to pull the dataset after a researchers at U Texas were able to de-anonymize the dataset, shown in their paper Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets.[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf]