I'll repost from another thread about the NYTime article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834681 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834681 : The next cont

I'll repost from another thread about the NYTime article, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834681 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834681 : The next contest info surprised me: "The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..." It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impending-still-avoidable-multi-million-dollar-privacy-blunder http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin... I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006