Oracle, the giant tech company, has agreed to pay $115 million to resolve legal claims that it improperly collected and sold personal data.
The legal war started in 2022, with a 66-page complaint filed in the Northern District of California.
A judge’s permission is still needed for the preliminary settlement, which was submitted to a federal court in San Francisco.
Furthermore, Oracle disputes any misconduct. Given that shares have gained in trading thus far, investors appear to be happy with this move.
The plaintiffs, represented by Lieff Cabraser, claimed that Oracle’s “worldwide surveillance machine” gathered extensive information on about five billion people.
Michael Katz-Lacabe of The Centre for Human Rights and Privacy, Dr. Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland, were the representatives of the class.
Newsng gathered that the compensation applies to anybody whose personal data Oracle has been collecting or selling since August 19, 2018.
Oracle has committed to stop collecting user-generated data from URLs of websites that have already been visited or text entered into online forms as part of the agreement, with the exception of Oracle’s websites.
Dr. Ryan stated, “Oracle has violated the privacy of billions of people across the globe.
“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.”
A $115 million non-reversionary common fund will be established by Oracle as part of the settlement.
This fund will be managed in escrow by the Settlement Administrator until it is released by the court.
The lawsuit serves as a reminder that the US does not yet have a comprehensive federal privacy statute.
Among them were the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and other common laws.
We earlier reported that Elon Musk’s start-up xAI reportedly cancelled a prospective $10 billion contract with Oracle to rent cloud servers from the software giant to create its AI-training infrastructure.
