Legal News

Did Netflix Violate Subscribers? Privacy? Lawsuit Says Yes

By Ashby Jones

A potentially very interesting lawsuit was filed in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday concerning a closeted lesbian’s privacy and Netflix, the movie rental company.

The woman, an Ohio resident who, for purposes of the lawsuit has requested anonymity, sued Netflix alongside others hoping to sue on behalf of a potential class, claiming that the company divulged personal information which allowed thousands to discern her sexual preference. Click here for the story, from Wired; here for the complaint.

Here’s the backstory. In 2006, Netflix initiated a contest in which it would pay $1 million to the first person or team of people to make certain improvements to its recommendation system — the system by which the company recommends movies to subscribers based on their previous movie selections.

As part of the contest, as explained in the Wired article, the company sent more than 50,000 contestants two huge troves of data. One contained 100 million movie ratings, the date of each rating, a unique ID number for the subscriber and information about the movie.

Thursday's suit argues that, based on this information alone, individuals’ identities could be figured out. In fact, according to the complaint, two University of Texas researchers did just that by comparing Netflix users’ “anonymous” reviews to ones posted on a different Web site, the Internet Movie Database website. Through such comparisons, the Texas researchers were able to unearth personal information, like users’ sexual orientation and religious beliefs.

The plaintiffs allege that Netflix violated a handful of California laws, in addition to the federal Video Protection Privacy Act. Interestingly, the VPPA was passed in the wake of the Robert Bork confirmation hearings, during which Bork’s video store gave a list of his rentals to a Washington reporter.

According to the complaint, the plaintiffs' and class members' movie data and ratings have now become a permanent, public record on the Internet.

In addition to damages, the also asking the court to stop Netflix from launching its promised second contest to improve the recommendations.

A Netflix spokesman said the company could not comment since it had not yet seen the suit.

We’d imagine that some people could care less who finds out what movies they’ve recently rented. Others obviously feel differently. LBers, any thoughts on this?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 18, 2009 (boomark / email).