Larry Ellison's words come back to haunt him in privacy lawsuit

Larry Ellison's presentation onstage at Oracle World six years ago saying that Oracle had amassed an ID Graph containing details of five billion people has come back to haunt him.

A collective of privacy advocates is now suing the software giant for privacy violations under a range of US laws including the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

The plaintiffs bringing the case include Michael Katz-Lacabe, a California-based privacy rights activist, Dr Jennifer Golbeck an associate professor at the University of Maryland in College Park and the director of the Social Intelligence Lab, and Dr Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute.

Ryan last year famously brought the Internet Advertising Bureau to heel with an action that ultimately found IAB Europe deprived hundreds of millions of Europeans of their fundamental rights.

In this new action filed last week, the plaintiffs allege that Oracle's business practices amount to  "a deliberate and purposeful surveillance of the general population via their digital and online existence."

Specifically targeting what it describes as Oracle's role as a worldwide data broker, the suit alleges the company has created a network that tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people.

"Oracle sells this detailed personal information to third parties, either directly, or through its 'ID Graph' and other related products and services derived from this data. The proposed Classes herein lack a direct relationship with Oracle and have no reasonable or practical basis upon which they could legally consent to Oracle’s surveillance."

Ellison's own words on stage at Oracle World are quoted against him. 

According to the complaint, Ellison likened the breadth and detail of Oracle’s data collection to Facebook’s— even arguing Oracle is better at mass surveillance and profiling than Facebook.

"Now where does this demographic data come from? Where does this past purchasing stuff come from? Well Oracle Data Cloud is the world’s largest database. There are two big databases to keep track of consumers and which have a lot of information about consumers. One is very famous, it’s called Facebook.

"The other one is less well known, it’s Oracle’s Data Cloud . . .They have great data, don’t get me wrong. Facebook has incredible data assets, but so do we. In our data cloud marketers are able to target consumers and do a much better job at predicting what they’re going to buy next."

So far, Oracle has not responded to the complaint.