American multinational tech company Oracle is facing a class-action lawsuit claiming it tracks and collects personal information on billions of people, generating revenue of over $40 billion a year in the process.
The class-action has three class representatives, including Dr. Johnny Ryan, Senior Fellow of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), and was filed against Oracle(Opens in a new window) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California last week. It alleges Oracle has violated the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, competition law, and the common law.
The scope of the lawsuit is huge, with the representatives acting, “on behalf of worldwide Internet users who have been subject to Oracle’s privacy violations,” which therefore equates to billions of people. Legal representation is being handled by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein(Opens in a new window).
Oracle stands accused of collecting detailed dossiers on 5 billion people, with the information gathered including names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity.
This claim is backed up by a video on the ICCL website(Opens in a new window) of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison describing how the company’s real-time machine learning system collects this information and confirms the 5 billion profiles stored in the “Oracle Data Cloud.” The profiles are referred to as a “Consumers Identity Graph.”
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Commenting on the lawsuit, Dr. Ryan said, “Oracle has violated the privacy of billions of people across the globe. This is a Fortune 500 company on a dangerous mission to track where every person in the world goes, and what they do. We are taking this action to stop Oracle’s surveillance machine.”
I have contacted Oracle and will update this post if and when an official statement regarding the class-action lawsuit is provided by the company.
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