Oracle Has Been Tracking Over 5 Billion People

oracle it's one of those big tech companies that consumers generally don't think about because well oracle doesn't make a bunch of shiny gadgets and gizmos for their consumers to buy and then show off to one another in fact the only time that most people even see oracle's logo these days is when they have to update java because that's one of the many technologies that they have acquired over the years from sun microsystems so yeah big tech company that most people just don't think about because well their focus has mostly been on enterprise technology and cloud services for over a decade now but just because this big tech company is not on your radar doesn't mean that they don't make moves similar to companies like amazon or facebook just like all of the rest of the big tech companies a big part of oracle's business is harvesting and then selling customer data and it looks like oracle might actually be better at this business than facebook microsoft amazon and all of the rest because a class action lawsuit has been brought against oracle accusing them of tracking over 5 billion people across the globe i know i was shocked too who would have thought that oracle of all companies would have had one of the largest data sets on the world's population ever you know this must really be upsetting to zuck homie came here from another galaxy to study our species and learn how to smoke meats yet he's getting bested by a company that's barely even recognizable these days so how did oracle manage to acquire this data on pretty much the entire world well it's laid out in the class action lawsuit here which i'm going to leave a link in the description of this video too if you want to read through the whole thing but if we go down to section six that is the statement of facts it explains how oracle is one of the world's largest data brokers in addition to its public-facing business of database and enterprise software now although oracle is a publicly traded business with a market cap of almost a quarter of a trillion dollars the revenue from the data brokering is not publicly disclosed so who knows exactly how much they are making off of this now the oracle id graph is a service product designed to provide identity resolution the process of matching individual customer identities and combining them into a single consistent and accurate customer profile this also includes inferring a lot of data about you it's not just raw information they're capturing like your geolocation and things of that nature oracle's id graph synchronizes the vast amounts of personal data oracle as a mast that is it matches personal data that can be determined to share a common origin with other personal data this synchronizing allows oracle to identify individuals and aggregate their many identifiers which in turn facilitates further synchronizing of personal data with a high degree of confidence as oracle in velveteen marketing language describes it the oracle id graph helps marketers connect identities across disparate marketing channels and devices to one customer so it doesn't matter if you're you know blocking all kinds of tracking on your computer right you could have a fully foss linux distro running ice cat and all that but if you also got a smartphone they might be able to associate those two things together and then track you more on the smartphone because it likely has far worse tracking protections powered by the oracle marketing cloud and oracle data cloud the oracle id graph seamlessly pulls together the many ids across marketing channels and devices that comprise a given person enabling marketers to tie their interactions to an actionable customer profile this id enables the marketer to orchestrate a relevant personalized experience for each individual across marketing channels and device types that's why you see ads for the exact same thing that you looked at on website a and then it gets advertised on facebook youtube and so on oracle and other data brokers act as a central node in the ad tech network where massive volumes of personal information on the world's population is aggregated and used to identify and profile individuals for targeted advertising and other commercial and political purposes and the worst part about all of this is how deeply embedded oracle's tracking is into so many different technologies like at least with facebook if you don't want them to track you just don't use facebook's products pretty easy to do uninstall their apps don't use whatsapp or instagram because facebook owns those too and you're done don't want amazon to track you okay don't use amazon don't use aws maybe a little bit harder because so many people use aws to set up their websites but don't use it personally don't give those websites or personal information done but if you want to avoid oracle tracking you well i guess you have to go be amish or get into some kind of self-sufficient community because pretty much every website is using one of oracle's products and their influence is basically invisible to the end user there's no prompt that pops up on any website asking if you're okay with oracle tracking you or if you're okay for oracle to apply analytics to the data that they have on you to make conclusions about you like oh this person is affiliated with this political group this person is probably overweight because they've been looking at weight loss stuff and also where to buy family size packs of doritos this person likes to go fishing this person is cheating on their wife and so on they also don't ask if it's okay for them to sell this data to their customers to oracle's customers which by the way their customers and their history gets really disturbing when you start to look into it oracle's first ever customer was the cia that's right that cia they needed a relational database and so they hired oracle to make it forum back in the late 70s in fact the name oracle comes from a code name of a cia project and the company oracle has been pulling in billions of dollars every single year since then working for governments at all levels for all manner of projects oracle's founder larry ellison also famously said in a new york times interview that he had about 20 years ago where he said that the single greatest step we americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single comprehensive national security database today every federal intelligence and law enforcement agency not to mention all manner of state and local bodies maintains its own separate database on people suspected of being criminals or terrorists a multitude of separate databases makes it very difficult for one agency to know about and apprehend someone wanted by another agency for example if there is a warrant for your arrest in florida that warrant will not be detected when you enter the country and show your passport at say boston's logan airport immigration officials check a couple of inter-agency watch list databases called nails and ibis but do not cross-check the other federal state and local databases there are simply too many of them that's why one of these september 11 terrorists made it through the passport control even though he had an outstanding arrest warrant in broward county florida oh yes how convenient that attack must have been for larry to shill his new world order database it gave you the perfect time to show this to the american people who were mostly cheering for bush to go and bomb some countries that they had never even heard of before yeah you're right larry we totally need your nwo security database that is combined with biometrics thumb prints hand prints iris scans or whatever is best to be used to detect people with false identities it's no wonder why oracle has been gathering personal information from over half of the world's population including their names their home and work addresses their email addresses their ip addresses their telephone numbers using their proprietary cookies javascript and tracking pixels developed by oracle that then gets shoehorned into practically every website and service on the web that dares to use oracle's technology and their back end all of this because larry ellison just wants to keep us safe from the heck and terrorist you guys oh what's that oracle's efforts have done absolutely nothing to stop terrorists in fact there's more terrorists now than before oracle's inception oh well at least harry ellison got to become a billionaire out of all this i mean that's good right so how do we mitigate the tracking capabilities of the cia puppet organization known as oracle well this is really a tough one considering how deeply embedded they are in the internet we can try to block their trackers and things like that but i honestly question how effective this is at stopping a company like oracle from tracking you especially after the manifest b3 update that's coming to chrome i believe in january of next year we could sit around and wait for the class action lawsuit to go somewhere but we've seen how that tends to go with big tech companies they get a slap on their wrist larry has to pay a fraction of his wealth and fines and then they go right back to doing you know what they're doing right the fines are just the cost of doing business so to do more i'll advise people developing web apps to try and avoid using oracle's products in the first place and sometimes this can be hard to do because oracle has acquired so many companies like add this which was specifically mentioned in the lawsuit document it's a widget that lets people visiting a website easily share it on their social media pages it's used on more than 15 million websites you've probably seen something like this where it just has a little easy button to let you tweet about something or whatever but this is property of oracle and so if you use this on your website your users are being tracked by oracle i know things like retargeting has been shown to increase sales online creating a little button that lets people easily tweet a product that they looked at on your website maybe gets you more traffic but more evidence is starting to come out that customers actually don't like retargeting they don't like ads that track them and i think as people start to realize that it's really the owners of various websites buying ads on facebook and google and so that's the reason why you're seeing ads for you know some pair of shoes that you looked at on coolshoes.com now you're seeing that everywhere on youtube and facebook it's cause coolshoes.com bought the ad that's really the reason why it's happening when people realize this i think they're gonna be more motivated to shop at places that don't engage in this tracking and this targeted advertising so stop doing it now get ahead of the not tracking your customers trend after all isn't getting ahead of trends something that every entrepreneur wishes they could do