Arvind Narayanan
More info
- Affiliation
- Princeton University
- Known for
- De-anonymizing the Netflix Prize data, AI Snake Oil
Computer scientist who showed that "anonymized" data rarely is, and has treated every new technology with the same suspicion ever since.
In 2008, with Vitaly Shmatikov, he showed that the ratings Netflix had released for its prize — formally stripped of identities — could be tied to named people using a handful of ratings and dates cross-referenced against IMDb. The paper became the standard citation for why sparse datasets can't be anonymized by deleting the name column, and Netflix cancelled its sequel competition after a lawsuit.
At Princeton he has measured web tracking at scale, co-written the textbook Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (2016), and, with Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil (2024) — a methodical sorting of AI claims that hold up from those that are prediction theatre.