Oracle has faced a class action lawsuit in the US over claims that the database giant has unlawfully collected detailed information on five billion people. The suit, which was filed on 19th August 2022 as a 66-page complaint in the Northern District of California, alleges the tech giant’s worldwide surveillance machine has amassed detailed dossiers on some five billion people, accusing the company and its adtech and advertising subsidiaries of violating the privacy of numerous people.

With the US having no comprehensive privacy law at federal level, the Oracle lawsuit alleges violations of 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. It alleges that Oracle collects large amounts from internet users without their consent and uses it to profile these individuals. It does this in various ways, including using its BlueKai tracking cookies.

According to Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), Oracle’s dossiers about people include 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. Previous class action suits A couple of years ago the firm was facing class action suits, along with Salesforce, via a legal challenge to its tracking in Europe – which intended to focus on the legality of their consent to track web users, citing the region’s (contrastingly) comprehensive data protection/privacy laws. However, the European legal challenges, which were filed in the Netherlands and the UK, have faced tough going – with a Dutch court ruling the suit inadmissible in 2021, because (it judged that the not-for-profit pursing the class action had failed to demonstrate it represented the alleged injured parties and so did not have legal standing.

The UK branch of the legal action, meanwhile, was stayed pending the outcome of an earlier class-action style privacy suit against Google, but in 2021 the UK Supreme Court sided with the tech giant, blocking that representative action and dealing a blow to the prospects of other similar suits. The ruling was considered a hammer blow to opt-out class actions for privacy claims at the time. .