Discuss: Do You Care if Netflix Gives Away Your Rental History?

Even if you don't live in the United States, you've likely heard of Netflix, the Internet-based DVD rental service responsible for ushering in the final days of Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos on every suburban street corner. For those who haven't used it, it's a very simple service: Add movies to your queue and within one business day, whatever is at the top of your queue magically ends up in your mailbox.

Simple service it may be, there's a lot of science (and magic) involved. Aside from the logistical aspect of managing, tracking, and dispersing millions of discs nationwide every single day, Netflix has the daunting task of being responsible for recommending movies based on your taste. However, the corporation's robominds are, to their own admission, fairly linear in their logic... Liked Dawn of the Dead 2004? You'll probably like 28 Days Later... So in an attempt to get a leg up on any future competitors, Netflix created the Netflix Prize in 2006.

The rules were simple: The first person or team to create a new collaborative filter algorithm that improved the recommendation accuracy of Netflix' own algorithm by at least 10% would take home $1,000,000. It may be a testament to how good Netflix' in-house system already was, but it took nearly 3 years for a team to make enough progress to claim the million dollar prize. Even then, deciding the winner came down to the wire; the second place team submitted their bid 20 minutes later than the winning team, which must be maddening in the scope of a 3-year long competition.


So the good news is, if you're a Netflix subscriber, you may soon notice a statistically significant increase in how creepily accurate the Netflix' robots can decipher why you loved the Prom Night remake. The potentially bad news is the service has now announced Netflix Prize 2. Only this time, the company is not providing garage hobbyists, corporate think-tanks, data miners, and whoever else wants it with just your anonymous movie-rating history. In addition to rental/rating history, Netflix will be giving out user's ages, genders and zip codes.

Now, they're not giving out your name, but studies have shown the above information can statistically re-identify a person with an accuracy of over 80%. To their credit, Netflix does not mandate that you provide them with your gender or year of birth, but neither are they openly informing users that have already provided this information that their not-totally-anonymous data is now going to be given out to any entity that enters the competition for Netflix Prize 2. Does this mean in a year or two you're going to inexplicably start receiving bulk mailings for Best Buy and Blockbuster coupons? Probably not.

But it does mean that for the first time in history, a data set encompassing millions of people's private movie watching habits is going to be made public to those who ask for it. While you're probably not bound to be personally identified because you gave 5 stars to both Baby's Day Out and all of the Texas Chainsaw Massacres, it does open up a window into the broader behavioral habits of entire zip-codes worth of movie lovers. Maybe everyone in your county loves Hotel For Dogs, so maybe it won't be long before you're seeing zip-code specific billboards and TV commercials for Hotel for Dogs 2.

So what do you think? How paranoid are you that someone might find out you've rented the R-rated version of Pirates 20 times? Would you care if, say, 20th Century Fox decided to enter the competition just to see whether everyone in Pahrump, Nevada is digging X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Do you not care at all, so long as the Netflix hive mind gets better at predicting only movies you're going to fall in love with? Even after all of this, do you, like me, still believe Netflix is actually powered by Unicorn blood?