A woman sued Netflix in December for privacy invasion after the company handed over anonymous user information earlier this year to thousands of teams competing in a Netflix-sponsored contest. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in the suit, called the act “the largest voluntary privacy breach to date.”

To those that aren’t familiar with the contest, this summer Netflix announced the winner of its $1 million algorithm contest – a contest in which the company awarded $1 million to the team that created an algorithm that improves Netflix’s movie recommendation system’s accuracy by 10 percent. The recommendation system is used to help Netflix customers find movies that are most relevant to their tastes.

In order to help contestants develop a winning algorithm, the company sent more than 50,000 teams over 100 million user ratings of movies, the date of the ratings, and a user ID number for the anonymous individuals responsible for each rating.

Jane Doe’s lawsuit alleges that distributing this data to contestants allowed researchers to quickly identify individual users responsible for the ratings by cross referencing Netflix information – which was anonymous – with other movie websites, according to a report by Wired. Based on this knowledge, combined with users’ anonymous posts on message boards of movie websites, researchers were able to discover information about the individuals, such as religious beliefs and sexual orientation.

Jane Doe, who is identified as a lesbian in her suit, says she would not like her sexual orientation to be widely known through her community and children’s schools as it would negatively affect her and her children’s livelihood. She is seeking class action status to her suit on behalf of other Netflix customers in similar situations.