Oracle at the center of a class action: it would illegally collect data on hundreds of millions of people

The Oracle’s data collection practices are at the center of a lawsuit filed in the United States, with the company being accused of illegally collect and store data on hundreds of millions of people in the world in what is defined “deliberate and intentional surveillance of the population using their digital and online life”.

Oracle’s data collection practices trigger a class action

The lawsuit, which was filed as a class action in the Northern District of California court, sees one of its promoters John Ryanmember of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Michael Katz-Lacabedirector of research at the US Center for Human Rights and Privacy, e Jennifer Golbeckassociate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.

Oracle offers a number of cloud-based marketing tools to allow companies to collect data on their users and measure the effectiveness of their promotional campaigns; the collection of this data takes place through so-called “pixels”, tools that use JavaScript and are more difficult to circumvent or block than cookies.

According to the trio, Oracle would be responsible for one indiscriminate data collection without regard for the law about. In fact, according to the indictment, Oracle would aggregate data from various sources, including the purchasing habits of users in physical stores through the technologies of Datalogix, a company acquired by Oracle in 2015. Oracle would also enrich its data by acquiring others from third parties, creating Extremely detailed profiles that also include very sensitive information such as political opinions, medicines used and belonging to ethnic groups.

“The personal information that Oracle collects through its tracking technologies along with that collected by third parties includes one billion pieces of data on more than 300 million people, or more than 80% of the US population.”, report documents filed in court. “[…] Oracle monitors the lives of the public in an opaque, if not invisible, way to the people it follows, as they have no relationship to Oracle. “

It should be noted that John Ryan resides in Dublin and in the legal documentation specifically reports how Oracle announced such data collection practices would be finished in Europe after September 2020but which until then would have also been conducted in the EU potentially going against the GDPR.

A similar legal action was initiated in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, targeting both Oracle and Salesforce: in the first case the court rejected it because it found that the promoter, the non-profit association Privacy Collective, has not demonstrated that he can represent the public (an appeal has been made); in Great Britain, on the other hand, the case has been put on hold for the final solution of a similar case against Google, in which the Court has taken the side of the US giant by stating that there must be demonstrable damage or loss for each individual, thus making a class action that is difficult to sustain.

Precisely the problems encountered in Europe, normally significantly more protective of its citizens and their rights, would have led to US legal action, which, however, has to deal precisely with the lesser protection offered by American law and must therefore use various laws. and references to ethics more generally to support his position, as he reports Robert Bateman.