Oracle hit by lawsuit in US for violating privacy of 5 billion people

US tech company Oracle is facing a class-action lawsuit which has claimed that it tracks and collects personal information on billions of people, generating revenue of over $40 billion a year in the process. 

The class-action lawsuit has three class representatives, including Johnny Ryan, Senior Fellow of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), who filed the lawsuit along with Michael Katz-Lacabe, director of research at The Center for Human Rights and Privacy; and Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. 

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. 

The lawsuit was filed against Oracle in the US District Court for the Northern District of California last week. The complaint against Oracle alleges violations of the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, California Invasion of Privacy Act, competition law, and the common law. 

Oracle, which employs 143,000 people worldwide, is headquartered in Texas, stands accused of collecting detailed dossiers on five 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. 

Oracle is an "important part of the tracking and data industry" and generates $42.4 billion in annual revenue, said the ICCL in a statement. 

"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," Ryan said in a statement. 

"For example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a 10 euro bet on an esports betting site," said the ICCL, further alleging that Oracle also “coordinates a global trade in dossiers about people through the Oracle Data Marketplace”. 

 In August 2020, Oracle and Salesforce faced a similar lawsuit under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy, in London and the Netherlands, which alleged the ad-tech subsidiaries of US giants are in breach of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. It was recently ruled to be "inadmissible, due to a lack of verified public support for the case". However, Ryan noted that case prompted a change in the tracking methods that both Oracle and Salesforce used, according to court documents.