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AOL, Netflix and the End of Open Research

Posted by Zonk on from the keeping-things-on-the-up-and-up dept.

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?"

2 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Inviting drama by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.' Eric, you fool! Have you no concept of the world's tencency toward drama and hilarity? Loudly declaring "this kind of thing could never happen at Google" is like saying "at least it's not raining" or "it's a million-to-one chance" or some other damn fool thing that will prove you wrong nine times out of ten.
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    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
  2. So... by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.' So...
    AOL = evil
    Netflix = evil
    Facebook = evil
    Goolgle != evil

    Thank you Eric for giving us the warm and fuzzies that Google is not evil with your two cents.
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    The game.