AOL, Netflix and the End of Open Research

An anonymous reader writes "In 2006, heads rolled at AOL after the company released anonymized logs of user searches. With last week's announcement that researchers had been able to learn the identities of users in the scrubbed Netflix dataset, could the days of companies sharing data with academic researchers be numbered? Shortly after the AOL incident, Google's Eric Schmidt called the data release 'a terrible thing,' and assured the public that 'this kind of thing could not happen at Google.' Will any high tech company ever take this kind of chance again? If not, how will this impact research and and the development of future technologies that could have come from the study of real data?"

Comments

Re:Correlations

[ShieldW0lf]

Do I care that information about me might have been released amongst all the rest? Not at all.

Do I care that massive companies and governments get to amass all this data and not share it with the rest of us? A great deal.

There is too much privacy. No one cares about your guilty little sexual encounters, no one cares what the doctor says is going to kill you, and there are truly evil people hiding terrible things while you concern yourself with such trivialities.

Get over yourself. Stop fighting for secrecy and start fighting against ignorance and the hypocrisies it breeds.