In Stranger Things Season 4 there is a scene where the gang needs to find a person simply known as Reefer Rick. Since Robin and Steve work at the movie rental store, they find a Rick in their database, whose movie rental list consists of a bunch of Cheech and Chong movies, drawing the conclusion that this is indeed Reefer Rick.
Earlier in the show, Steve and Robin have a conversation about Robins crush's Vickie, and Robin is unsure if Vickie is a lesbian. Steve mentions that he has checked Vickie's movie rental records, and can infer that Vickie is a lesbian, due to having paused and returned the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High after a particularly sexy scene.
These scenes are direct examples of how a user's movie preferences can reveal the user's sensitive and private behavioural traits (drug use, sexual preference, political inclination, interests, ethnic backgrounds). The Algorithm knows I'm black is an interesting deep dive into concerns about Netflix's user data collection and usage.
These scenes unintentionally echo the deep data analysis done by streaming platforms today. Funnily enough, they sit in a show produced by Netflix.
Streaming platforms today are definitely able to harvest tons more data than this, and analyse it faster than 4 teenagers in the 80s. While the Stranger Things gang had to simply rely on the user's movie rental history and the movie timestamp on return, today's platforms have access to time-of-day usage data, scene skips, pause times, rewinds, continuous time spent, and so much more user data.
In Dec 2024 Netflix was fined €450K by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) for not informing customers clearly enough in its privacy statement about what exactly Netflix does with the customer's data.
This fine points to the fact that Netflix has not been fully transparent with users about how their data is being used, or who their data is being shared with.
While regulations around user data collection, storage, and usage are catch up, we as consumers, need to ask more from the platform in terms of transparency and reduced telemetry.
We should expect more ethical platforms that allow us to opt-out of recommendations in order to further protect us from data collection, and more granular control on what data we consent for collection.
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