A class action lawsuit filed against Oracle on Friday in the Northern District of California claims that the tech giant has built a worldwide surveillance machine.

According to the complaint, Oracle’s business practices “amount to a deliberate and purposeful surveillance of the general population via their digital and online existence,” tracking and recording the personal information of hundreds of millions.

The complaint also claims that the collected information is being sold to third parties through various products and services, including the ID Graph, and that the proposed classes have “no reasonable or practical basis upon which they could legally consent to Oracle’s surveillance.”

Representatives in the suit include Michael Katz-Lacabe (privacy rights activist), Dr. Jennifer Golbeck (associate professor at University of Maryland in College Park), and Dr. Johnny Ryan (senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties).

According to the complaint, Oracle has created electronic profiles on all three representatives, based on their web browsing and other online activities, without their consent, and also shared this personal information with third parties, including advertisers.

“Oracle tracks the lives of the general public in a manner that is opaque, if not invisible, to the people it follows, as they have no direct relationship with Oracle. Oracle does not even maintain a pretense of having directly obtained the consent of the subjects of its surveillance who have no legal or practical ability to consent to Oracle’s conduct,” the document reads.

The complaint makes reference to multiple laws that Oracle’s business model is supposedly in violation of.

SecurityWeek has reached out to Oracle for comment.

By Ionut Arghire on Wed, 24 Aug 2022 13:54:44 +0000
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