Netflix Ditches Beat-Our-Recommendation-System Contest Due to Privacy Questions

Netflix's grassroots competition to best its recommendation algorithm was a bit popularity booster for the company--but thanks to concerns over privacy (backed up by one troubling example), the company has decided to kill the contest.

Netflix's recommendation engine can be a little wonky. (I know the film Big Fan is about football, and stars comedian Patton Oswalt, but it's also a painful drama written and directed by the guy who wrote The Wrestler, and it's an exceptionally bleak and dark...