Well, the lawyers have won again. Netflix settled the privacy lawsuit brought about by their last contest out of court, and canceled the next contest. Good thing we have outraged class action lawsuits to protect us!
Netflix of course ran a contest to find a better algorithm to recommend movies. Harmless right? Well, in order to help people figure out how to do this, Netflix released a bunch of viewer reviews of movies to interested parties, and that’s where the problem came in. Apparently there was a little too much information in those reviews, which would apparently allow people to compare similarly word reviews to other sites, and thus potentially find out who the author really is. Netflix was promptly sued back in December, and just announced that they’ve settled out of court, and will be discontinuing any further contests.
[via The Firewall]