Oracle agrees to pay $115 million to settle privacy invasion lawsuit
The lawsuit accuses Oracle of creating detailed digital dossiers on millions of individuals, including their browsing, banking, and shopping activities, and selling this data for targeted advertising.
Oracle has settled a $115 million lawsuit to resolve allegations of consumer privacy invasion through the collection and sale of personal information. The preliminary settlement, filed in a San Francisco federal court, awaits a judge’s judgement. Despite agreeing to the settlement, Oracle denied any wrongdoing in their defence.
The plaintiffs accused Oracle of violating federal and state privacy laws by creating unauthorised ‘digital dossiers’ for millions of people. These dossiers reportedly included data on browsing behaviour, banking activities, and shopping preferences. They claimed Oracle sold this information to marketers, sometimes using products like ID Graph for targeted advertising.
The settlement applies to individuals whose data was collected or sold since August 2018. As part of the agreement, Oracle will cease gathering information from URLs of previously visited websites or from online forms not on Oracle’s own sites. The company, based in Austin, Texas, did not respond to requests for comment.
Privacy rights activist Michael Katz-Lacabe and social media and privacy professor Jennifer Golbeck are among the named plaintiffs. Their legal team, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, may seek up to $28.75 million from the settlement for legal fees.
About author
DW Team
The GIP Digital Watch Observatory team, consisting of over 30 digital policy experts from around the world, excels in the fields of research and analysis on digital policy issues. The team is backed by the creative prowess of Creative Lab Diplo and the technical expertise of the Diplo tech team.