In 2006
Netflix began the
Netflix Prize competition for better
recommendation algorithms. In order to facilitate the competition, Netflix released "anonymized" viewership information. However, Narayanan and advisor
Vitaly Shmatikov showed possibilities for
de-anonymizing this information by linking this anonymized data to publicly available
IMDb user accounts. Narayanan later de-anonymized graphs from social networking and writings from blogs. In mid-2010, Narayanan and
Jonathan Mayer argued in favor of
Do Not Track in
HTTP headers. They built prototypes of Do Not Track for clients and servers. Working with
Mozilla they wrote the influential
Internet Engineering Task Force Internet Draft of Do Not Track. Narayanan has written extensively about software cultures. He has argued for more substantial teaching of ethics in
computer science education and
cryptography. In 2024, Narayanan collaborated with fellow scholar Sayash Kapoor to write
AI Snake Oil debunking theories about AI and exploring its possible future. == Awards ==