CPA Magazine | Scott Ikeda | Aug 29, 2022

A class action lawsuit is accusing Oracle of conducting global surveillance, essentially attempting to create detailed shopping and spending profiles of the world’s entire population.

The suit accuses Oracle of creating profiles for five billion people worldwide, attaching things like purchase records and GPS locations to their name and contact information. While social media platforms usually dominate the conversation about global surveillance, the Oracle Data Marketplace and the company’s BlueKai service have quietly become one of the world’s largest sources of the sort of personal information that “data brokers” sell for targeted advertising purposes.

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Class action lawsuit

• The class action lawsuit points to Oracle marketing materials claiming to provide dossiers on five billion individuals, generating some $42.4 billion in annual revenue for the company.
• The suit alleges that these profiles tie names, home addresses, emails to a worrying amount of information: purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and detailed accounts of online activity.
  • One illustrative detail provided is the profile of a man in Germany who had a €10 bet on an esports betting site logged in his profile.
• The class action lawsuit has been filed in California and alleges violations of Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, competition law, and common law.
• The suit seeks to force Oracle to stop collecting this data and to make restitution to those who have had profiles created, due to being created without the subject’s knowledge or consent.

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• People are not even aware of what Oracle (and similar brokers) are doing, they have no material relationship with these companies and cannot possibly be giving consent to have these marketing profiles developed.
• The damage Oracle has done is beyond invasion of personal privacy. It cites “Project Alamo,” a 220-million person database created using Oracle services, as an example of micro-targeted voter suppression that may have impacted the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
• It also raises fears about the potential use of these marketing databases by law enforcement organizations in the wake of the Roe v. Wade repeal, as a means to surveil the visitors of services such as Planned Parenthood.

Continue to the full article –> here

View the 69 page PDF complaint –> here

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