to preserve customer privacy, the Prize has been criticized by privacy advocates. In 2007 two researchers from The University of Texas at Austin were able to identify individual users by matching the data sets with film ratings on the Internet Movie Database. On December 17, 2009, four Netflix users filed a class action lawsuit against Netflix, alleging that Netflix had violated U.S. fair trade laws and the Video Privacy Protection Act by releasing the datasets. There was public debate about privacy for research participants. On March 19, 2010, Netflix reached a settlement with the plaintiffs, after which they voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit. See also Crowdsourcing Open innovation Innovation competition Inducement prize contest Kaggle List of computer science awards References External links Netflix Prize on RecSysWiki Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets by Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov The Netflix $1 Million Prize - Netflix never used its $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs (2009) - Saint Computer science competitions Crowdsourcing 2009 awards in the United States Prize