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:Opt-in

[CodeBuster]

What makes you think that the MPAA wouldn't be able to afford the services of Chuck Norris?

Chuck Norris? Isn't he getting a bit long in the tooth? They would probably prefer someone like Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell or one some other professional mixed martial arts fighter instead...

It has to be said.

[palegray.net]

Why depend on Fortune 500 companies to provide large volumes of data to researchers? They provide data comprised of alphanumeric character sequences, punctuation, etc, right? There's a better way that provides that plus a more complete representation of the entire character set! Every UNIX-based machine comes with a built in data generator: /dev/random

(depending on your machine, your mileage may vary with the quality of the data).