Oracle has reached a $115 million settlement in a consumer privacy lawsuit filed in 2022 in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit accused Oracle of secretly creating and selling dossiers containing detailed personal information on millions of people, including non-users, and earning $42.5 billion annually from these practices.
Oracle allegedly used a variety of tracking techniques to gather data on internet users, including cookies, fingerprinting, JavaScript, and tracking pixels. The company also collected data through its “AddThis” social bookmarking service and by purchasing consumer data from third-party brokers like Datalogic.
The lawsuit claimed Oracle’s dossiers included full names, home addresses, race, political views, retail purchases, and location data. Oracle’s “Oracle ID Graph” tool used this information to identify individual internet users and offered these profiles to private and government buyers. The lawsuit emphasized the secrecy of Oracle’s data collection methods, highlighting that its privacy policies did not clearly disclose the extent of data gathering and sharing.
Settlement Details
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- Date: 25 July 2024
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- Amount: $115 million
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- Impacted Individuals: Approximately 220 million people
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- Legal Fees: Up to $28 million sought by the involved law firm
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- Data Collection Changes: Oracle will stop collecting text from forms on non-Oracle websites and cease gathering user-generated information from URLs of previously visited websites.
Furthermore, Oracle announced its exit from the ad tracking business and plans to delete stored customer data after fulfilling obligations to data providers.
Read more here.
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