Lawsuit accuses Oracle of facilitating sales of 'billions' of folks' personal data Oracle is the subject of a class-action suit alleging the software giant created a network containing personal information of hundreds of millions of people and sold the data to third parties. The case [PDF] is being brought by Johnny Ryan, formerly a policy officer at Brave, maker of the privacy-centric browser, and now part …
I've no doubt Oracle would like to be doing "real time" social monitoring, location tracking and behaviour prediction, but I very much do doubt Oracle are capable of doing that. I'd be genuinely astonished if they're up to anything more nefarious or complicated than a join across Micros and whatever other bags of shit Larry's been buying in the consumer and ad tech spaces.
But the idea of an exadata somewhere running a global-scale population graph and real-time personalisation does, if nothing else, raise a smile.
The essential thing is they managed to convince the digital advertising industry that they can do it. I'd like to present the $42.4 billion in annual revenue as evidence and, at the same time, as reason why they will get away with it.
Yes, if I have stayed next to the clotted cream section in a refrigerated isle for a while, wrestling with my conscience, I am also likely to buy scones and strawberry jam.
There, Mr Ellison, you no longer need to track my perambulations around Sainsbury's*.
*Other purveyors of jam, scones and clotted cream are, I believe, available.
So many choices......
We have the component parts:
Scone, butter jam & clotted cream.
Now do you have all 3 on top of the scone?
Which order?
Then there is the additional complications:
Plain or fruity scone?
Strawberry or some other jam?
For me the default is fruity, butter, strawberry jam & clotted cream but I have been known to b radical and daringly switch to cherry jam if it is available!
Ellison said at the time [1:15 onward]: "It is a combination of real-time looking at all of their social activity, real-time looking at where they are including, micro-locations..."
Yes, yes, but what about health data? Not included?
Ah, they're in the planning...
Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/10/oracle_us_health_database/
Excellent!
Jan K. "Yes, yes, but what about health data? Not included?"
Article: " including, micro-locations..."
I.e., which part of the hospital you are in and therefore deducing possibly what is is being examined, or which mini-aisle in the Boots pharmacy section you tend to visit a lot ...
(Just a thought, but now I think about it, a rather worrying one.)
Is Oracle doing it's best to realize Larry's vision of a surveillance Panopticon? Absolutely.
But the lawsuit seems on shaky ground.
"The complaint against Oracle 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."
This has the look of a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach. If the have any success, it would probably be from the California Invasion of Privacy Act, assuming they can present more evidence than is referenced in the article. Even then, it would only apply to California.
The lawsuit is correct but it strikes me as Quixotic.
Is it a case of "get to discovery and we can actually see what's what"?
With the claims being made by Larry surely one could have a reasonable worry. Get to discovery and you can force the company to hand things over or deny having stuff (setting up a potential fall if it later turns out they did have it).
Remember that your moblie carrier and ISP probably both decided the could do deep traffic inspection, DNS manipulation, and in some cases a full MITM SSL hijack on your traffic. Who do you think they were selling that log data to?
Make every one of these companies report what data they are holding, on who, and where they got it from, then make them link to central, third party run site with gov oversight and with a big red delete button on it. Please and thank you.
"Make every one of these companies report what data they are holding, on who,"
In the EU and UK that is the law. Organisations which collect personal information have to register the data collected and the reasons for collecting it with the Information Commissioners Office. They are not allowed to just collect personal data 'on the off chance they might find it interesting' and they are not allowed to use it for a purpose other than ones they have declared in advance.
Many larger tech concerns simply ignore laws which cannot be adequately surveilled.
It's as if the pertinent laws simply do not exist for them. C'est un monde heureux!
If anyone notices, there is always a convenient employee to be blamed, and never the corporation's fault.
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