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Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine

413 points by trasz 4y ago

wolongong942 4y ago
So does anybody know from where they are collecting this data?
- Calvin02 4y ago
  - Public records (property records, dmv, etc.) - Financial institutions/companies (plaid, banks, credit bureau, mortgage providers, reward credit cards, automotive loan providers, etc.) - Loyalty program (macy/nordstorms, safeway, vons, walgreens, etc.) - Warranty providers (appliance & car warranty registrations), etc.. People and media get riled up about Google and Facebook but the data that they have on me is pretty coarse and pales in comparison to what DataLogix, which is a company that Oracle acquired, and other companies have been able to build. We are not rational when it comes to these arguments.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    We always respond to the evil we see, not the evil unseen and looming in the shadows. If you're about to get stung by a scorpion then deal with that before dealing with the lion slowly stalking you.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Well if the goal is better privacy laws, it doesn't really matter who the pitchforks are pointed at since the law affects everyone.
    - Calvin02 4y ago
      That's fair but arguably the value exchange of searching for something and being served ads for that is significantly better than me signing up for a mortgage and now being bombarded by ads for life insurance. Alternative narrative: Google and Facebook are directly threatening news media while DataLogix isn't and therefore doesn't get the attention that it ought to get.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    If they have data of 5 billion people, they must buy it actively from every middleman.
- nabakin 4y ago
  My question as well
- dogman144 4y ago
  BlueKai/pixel tracking iirc is a core part, the rest of it is stuff like Bluetooth receivers on top of grocery isles while you have your Bluetooth on, etc.
- Labo333 4y ago
  A lot of applications sell user data. Like menstrual cycle for Flo, seropositive status for Grindr. A lot of apps sell your location data. Plus there is a very overlooked category of corporate software selling data, like payrolls. This can be used to target you better (eg can you afford that product). Another example is Salesforce selling consumer data to marketing departments: https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-sharing/ https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-sha...
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Fascinating; I never realized Oracle is such a massive player in that space. Ugh :(
- ethbr0 4y ago
  1. Is it profitable? 2. Is it evil? Then yes, Oracle is a big player in that space.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    > 2. Is it evil? You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawn mower. It's not evil, it just is.
    - thatguy0900 4y ago
      Not really fitting. Oracle is just a group of people. If you take away the rider, a lawnmower is still a lawnmower. If you take away the employees oracle entirely ceases to exist. You can't hand wave their moral responsibilities as humans.
    - sockaddr 4y ago
      Yes, but the lawnmower was designed and is being pushed by a human (Ellison), no? Then one could say it's an evil tool? It's really not that much of a stretch to anthropomorphize things when we view tools as extensions of ourselves.
      - mintplant 4y ago
        Ellison isn't pushing the lawnmower, he is the lawnmower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
    - sophacles 4y ago
      What's the lawnmower here? The corporation? But corporations are people, so how is treating a person like a person anthropomorphification?
mistrial9 4y ago
on a related note - I picked up a ten year old Mac laptop here in California, let the Chrome browser update itself so HTTPS will work, did a google search for a research paper PDF, and at the bottom of the search page it clearly said -- CityName,ZipCode based on your last activity. Login (the city and zip where I live and sometimes use a Google chromebook for YouTube) this older Mac laptop is not a google computer, no google account active, not logged in. That is a profile indicator, adding to my "dossier." How is this OK now?
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  It seems to me that's pretty much the "current" location, since it's the "last used location to call google", which you just did when you did your search.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    no, the "current location" was not listed
- rblatz 4y ago
  Isn't that just IP Geolocation? That has been common place for at least a decade.
- paxys 4y ago
  When you visit a website it gets your IP address. It can look up a geolocation database to narrow down the IP to a city/region. You can use an anonymous VPN if you want to prevent this.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    there is difference between "get the IP location now" and "keep every location in a history for this user without consent"
- dont__panic 4y ago
  If you're using Chrome, you shouldn't be complaining about surveillance. That browser literally identifies everything you do on the internet with a single ID, fed directly to Google. At that point I don't think your IP geolocation is the largest infringement of your personal privacy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
buscoquadnary 4y ago
Oracle is a law firm that has an engineering department attached, and they specialize in proctology.
- forinti 4y ago
  I think of Oracle as a marketing company with a technology department.
  - neodypsis 4y ago
    Isn't it the case that most of their technology nowadays comes from acqui-hiring?
    - neodypsis 4y ago
      Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
- blantonl 4y ago
  and they specialize in proctology ooof
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around "engineering". Had a colleague that interned at Oracle and was proud of how he learned to make better Powerpoint slidesets there. His tips included "Always make slide headings full sentences including full stops". He would rename a slide titled "System architecture overview" to "The system architecture is distributed in four microservices.". (This would be above the chart showing the actual architecture) Turns out Oracle execs famously print out slidesets, don't read them, but do read the headings, so this was what he had to do to ..."succeed".
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around "engineering". I did my PhD at Oracle. We got several top-tier papers from the work we did. There’s excellent engineering at Oracle.
winternett 4y ago
When I go shopping, or even to my doctor now, I leave my phone in my car. I work very hard to not let my phone be required for as many transactions as possible, and write my most important and private thoughts by hand on paper instead of in my phone. People think I'm crazy and paranoid, but their cell phone is probably still tracking me along with store cameras or whatever other BS invasive companies can concoct (less accurately), so at least it's someone else's fault now, rather than being my own. I'll eagerly look forward to getting my $1.39 from the class action suits once the lawyers all get paid.
- adolph 4y ago
  Why leave it in a car instead of using a Faraday bag? Example product, no affiliation: https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-Phones/dp/B01A7MACL2 https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-P...
- blantonl 4y ago
  The joke about the $1.39 made me laugh, but it also made me wonder: At what point will there be a tipping point where the pitchforks come out and the general public's "patience" with regulation catching up to this crap begins to unravel and actual violence or "direct action" begins to occur against these actors? Because while we're focused on individual political officials actions as a distraction, these types of warehouses are getting bigger and bigger, making more and more money for the owners, and becoming used more and more for malicious activities.
  - archildress 4y ago
    I've thought about this many times, and my answer is: when there is a massive, at-scale leak of seriously disruptive personal information. Think Google search history, medical files, or databases of credit card transactions. When it takes enough peoples' lives off the normal track, people will finally be fed up.
    - zx85wes 4y ago
      The outrage would only be temporary (again). And then things would go back to 'normal'
bitwrangler 4y ago
Many people don't realize that Larry started with CIA and they were his first customer. Maybe his endgame is related to his beginning. https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
  - beckingz 4y ago
    Larry "paperclip maximizer" Ellison
  - tomxor 4y ago
    Thank you, this made me laugh IRL :D
  - exhilaration 4y ago
    For the uninitiated, that's from this video of Bryan Cantrill (from Sun), link goes to the right time: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  And running those databases were Sun machines. Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy's famous comment, "You have no privacy; get over it," is all the more ominous in light of this. The fact that corporations now have all the data on us just brings them into parity with the government. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    What a non American saying. We should exile this traitor.
  - 4y ago
potatoman22 4y ago
I wonder if Oracle will leverage their acquisition of Cerner to track people's health data as well.
kaba0 4y ago
Is there a similar one against Facebook, Google, etc?
rvz 4y ago
Good. Time to get the rest of the other Big Tech surveillance machines created by Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc., Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc., and especially, Alphabet Inc. To downvoters: So you want more worldwide surveillance from the Big Tech companies then? Do you trust them not to abuse or collect more of your sensitive data like your passwords, phone numbers, location, etc? That includes TikTok's US 'secure cloud provider', Oracle Inc. Looks like there are lots of users here that are too scared to admit or confess helping the current tech dystopia that they are creating. This lawsuit can only be a good thing in clamping down on the daily mass surveillance done by these companies.
throwaway0asd 4y ago
Potential loss of privacy is inherent upon any data driven economy generally or use of centralized database specifically unless there are specific laws in place to guarantee privacy protections that provide a clear path to enforcement with devastating penalties. You have to incentivize businesses, as data storage entities, by destroying their financial solvency upon the face of privacy violations or privacy will always remain a discarded nuisance much like accessibility.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  How about publicly shaming the developers who wrote the code to make this possible? Seems only fair, since they voluntarily shared ours private details.
  - sillystuff 4y ago
    Apparently some of them see no reason that they should feel shame. See comments on this article from yesterday. A person who used to work at Google in the Adwords group comments extensively on the thread. It was eye opening for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749 Edit: Note, they have edited some of their comments like their previous response to a comment, "Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders." where the previous response was "lol (and something the the effect of, no I don't care)".
    - throwaway0asd 4y ago
      Hypocritically people bitch about intrusive data collection from governments and yet simultaneously give away the same data, and encourage others to do the same, and more to private companies knowing that data will be weaponized against them. As such it’s almost impossible to take any opinion promoting commercial violations of privacy seriously.
ByThyGrace 4y ago
Should I uninstall VirtualBox?
- kstrauser 4y ago
  If you're using the extension pack for work, and haven't paid for it, probably: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
- sysadm1n 4y ago
  I look for Oracle-specific traffic on VB and there's no telemetry or anything like that, which is surprising. I'm more concerned about malware escaping sandboxes when analyzing malware than Oracle spying on me through VB
- everdrive 4y ago
  How troubling
rblion 4y ago
I can't believe Elison 'owns' 99% of Lana'i too.
nojito 4y ago
This data is from an acquisition they made of BlueKai. Not sure why it's hitting the news now. There are equally large datasets available by other entities.
therealmarv 4y ago
What about Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook/Meta?
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
This is how we collectively got here: "This product doesn't work for me, I want something that does." We collectively asked for more product/service diversity, more on-demand personalization and lower prices and we got it. We need to accept that the attention/surveillance economy is a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my undergraduate thesis on "Nash equilibria to predict consumer decision making under uncertainty" under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL before machine learning was even a core field of Computer Science. People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision Process that is you. Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don't even know this is happening and honestly don't care because you get benefits from it. The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet part out loud
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I love the part where he said "This is scaring the lawyers. They're shaking their heads and covering their eyes" Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    Unlike most public corporations, Larry is Dictator for Life so I don't think he has to ask anyone for permission to do anything.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team. Because in most companies the PR team is near the bottom of the list of influence. Only slightly above coders. Certainly well below bean counters, salesfolk, and anyone with a TLA.
kasajian 4y ago
At first I was happy to see this trending as I thought this was going to talk about what I believe. What I believe: The reasons humans are the way we are is because of how natural selection favors survival of those who are better at propagating their genes. All other behaviors tie back to that single need. That criteria are the reasons why we don't want to be "turned off" with a switch. A computer does not evolve in the same way; they don't have that same prime directive. The idea that a computer should be asked if it's ok to be turned off is applying aspects of human condition, sentiency, to an entity to which it does not apply. One can argue that there's no way to prevent the possibility of humans eventually applying such an attribute to an entity that we've created only because that's all we know how to do. In other words, computers won't take over because one day they wake up and become sentient. It will happen because we have decided they should behave exactly as we expect a sentient being ought to behave . Thus, it becomes that way by definition. This article was disappointing -- it went in an entirely different direction. That the math doesn't add up? Really? You can't figure out the math so it can never be done? Kinda hard to take seriously, tbh.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Was this the wrong thread you posted in?
yazzku 4y ago
That presentation is utterly disgusting. We are people, not consumers to be spied on.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  maybe better to hate the game more than the individual players
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Is that what you say when Dennis Rodman throws Pippen into the stands? This is a thread about a lawsuit after all, the games rules have apparently been violated.
  - perlgeek 4y ago
    I have enough hate in me to hate both.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
yazzku 4y ago
Fuck Oracle and surveillance capitalism.
NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
Relevant copypasta: Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality: Data service: The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts. Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (VCC) like at privacy.com. It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. There is also Abine Blur, and some others. Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. You can also buy prepaid VCCs with crypto. All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc. OS: GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can make a secondary profile in which you install Google Play Services to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. Unprivileged here means it's like any other app: if you don't give it access to your location, it won't know where you are. If you end the profile session when you leave, Play Services stops running and stops talking to Google. CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen. LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android. There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e Hardware: CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS. You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you. Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
aprdm 4y ago
I interviewed at Oracle sometime ago, and the product was basically tracking where your eye ball was focusing.. pretty crazy times we live in.
- gordaco 4y ago
  This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it. I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software. Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming-for-you-8720f8d8109f https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming....
jahewson 4y ago
I’m doubtful about this lawsuit. Talk of “dossiers” is extremely hyperbolic. For those not familiar with it, Oracle’s data platform is effectively a supermarket, stocking the freshest data indexed by “audience” - behavioural interest groups. This data comes from “data providers” - companies who hold data on the behaviours of specific audiences and (are supposed to) have the right to sell it on. They are paid a commission on each sale. Once you understand this then the lawsuit makes less sense - it’s like suing Safeway because you don’t like the ingredients of Cheez-Its. Now, there’s more to it than that, of course, but “some data providers in the marketplace may have issues” is very different from “Oracle has lawless stack of 5bn of dossiers”.
- hedora 4y ago
  If a picture of Larry Ellison in front of a thirty foot screen with the title "Oracle Data Cloud: 5 billion consumer profiles in database; largest consumer identity graph in the world" isn't enough evidence that they're storing and providing access to consumer dossiers, then what would be?
  - jahewson 4y ago
    Lol, that’s Larry’s marketing material. Database = store shelves. Likewise Safeway has thousands of products on its shelves - they don’t make any of them, not even the ones with their brand on.
    - hedora 4y ago
      So, the defense is that he's lying about having access to illegal goods, but selling them anyway. I went down to Safeway yesterday, and bought a kilo of cocaine. It turns out it was ground up sudafed and talcum powder. The cops were like "lolz. that's all on you; it's just how they market these days".
      - jahewson 4y ago
        Huh? He’s just a CEO talking-up his product. Safeway has exclusive deals nowhere else has! Kind of… it’s marketing spin but it’s not a lie. Also having the same data in a database wouldn’t necessarily be illegal, but it would be useless as behavioural data ages-out after 90 days or less.
billsmithaustin 4y ago
Are we really referring to data records as dossiers now? I think of a dossier as a record of things like suspected infidelity or membership in a dangerous political group. Do credit ratings and purchase history really rate as a dossier?
- hedora 4y ago
  Based on the information in the article, Oracle profiles provide enough information to uncover infidelity and membership in political groups. In particular, they track purchase history, physical location and online telemetry. Their marketing information explicitly says they use the above to build social graphs of consumer profiles. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to prevent that from linking you to your hypothetical mistress and militia buddies. You'd need to not carry a phone, pay with cash, stay masked (that's easy now, I guess) and avoid using a car with a built in cell modem or legible license plates. If Cory Doctorow is to be believed, gait tracking is also a thing now, so rotate through walking with thumb tacks and rocks in one or the other shoe. Even then, you're still thoroughly in Death Note territory where you'll accidentally feed a few (information theoretic) bits of information to the database every once in a while. Also, if you follow all my advice, this XKCD will apply to you: https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/ So, to answer your question, yes.
- openfuture 4y ago
  Don't you get it.. the dangerous political group is just normal people.. Haven't you been to an airport? or survived this covid period? The fear is proportional to the advantage. If there's a 1000$ behind a door that costs 500$ to open then you open it no? Then the people who own everything must raise the price of opening the door or they'll have mutiny on their hands. We've seen the price steadily go up and it's not a coincidence.
hedora 4y ago
There really need to be minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing, payable direct to consumer. I think $10,000 per offense would be a bit too low. I want to live in a world where shareholders can look at that slide and say: 5 billion victims times $10K means they have amassed $50T in toxic assets. I'm jumping ship, and/or joining a shareholder lawsuit.
kleiba 4y ago
I don't own any kind of mobile device, and many, many times in my life have I gotten the raised eyebrows with a puzzled "you as a computer scientist don't have a phone??". I usually I don't say it out loud but in my head the answer is always "because I am a computer scientist I don't have a phone". I've often wondered why I'm in such a tiny minority even among my CS peers... Then again, at least over here in Europe, new cars will mandatorily have tracking devices built in, so perhaps my whole effort was kinda moot to begin with.
jotm 4y ago
The German gov won't give you your tax return if you don't tell them your current place of residence (abroad, in DE they know everything) lol But yeah, private companies on top of governments is even worse.
hedora 4y ago
OK, so, hypothetically (really, hypothetically), someone caught my eye on the street, so I decided to face recognize them to get their real name and home address, then bought up access to all their credit card statements and their social media friends list. Next, I misrepresented myself to ingratiate myself with their friends, all in order to exploit them financially. I did some other stuff, like track their car, which let me infer all sorts of juicy things about their personal health and private life. I openly bragged about this on data-broker sites, and shared their info (for money) with people with similar interests. They had different end goals in mind, but I don't know what they were, so that's not on me right? Anyway, I managed to net $8 for my trouble, but got caught and they successfully sued me. Should I expect the damages to be more or less than the per-person pay out this lawsuit is likely to generate? How is what Oracle did any different?
hnburnsy 4y ago
Others have said it, but despite all this tracking I rarely see relevant advertising that is even close to targeting me, not on the web, not in my inbox, not on my TV, and not in my mail's box. I even have my YouTubetv set to allow personalized ads but the inserted Google ads are still just mass market ads for cars, movies, and insurance.
alexb_ 4y ago
If privacy is so obviously dead, why stay private? If the battle is You vs Team of Engineers Specifically Trying To Spy On You you are always going to lose. So why even try?
- j-bos 4y ago
  Because wars are lost when the other side gives up.
- sweetbitter 4y ago
  Because I'm mostly winning the battle. These people are reduced to performing facial recognition and plate recognition in-person. No active cell modem in the car, no smartphone, and a free-software-only machine emitting just the bytes required to make this post over onion routing.
trustevertone 4y ago
Oracle is evil
cerol 4y ago
With enough data, you can model user behavior pretty accurately. But you can also use the same data to train models that generate valid user behavior patterns. The ad industry is very profitable, but it seems to hang in the balance. Ads are effective as long as data you use to segment users are accurate. What happens if data becomes corrupted? Something like "This Person Does Not Exist" [0], but for user data. Your user behavior just remarkably similar to your actual behavior, but you can filter out the sensitive parts. I'd love to see someone come up with a program or little gadget you can solder to the "smart"-things, and actual usage telemetry will train a locally deployed model that generates user behavior data that is indistinguishable from real user data, only it doesn't say anything about you. [0] https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/
lizardactivist 4y ago
I presume iPhones and "regular" Android phones are the main pipes that fill these databases. It may not be of dire consequence to most of us regular people, but it surprises me that banks, political institutes, corporations, and even governments around the world happily let their people use these phones for work.
Scoundreller 4y ago
I guess if you're in the US, you can request your data here: https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-identity https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-... dunno how it works for anyone anywhere else, but I'm finding out!
- natpalmer1776 4y ago
  I am receiving "This Service is Currently Unavailable" when submitting the form.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Typical oracle product.
dijonman2 4y ago
I use a faraday bag and keep my phone in it when driving. Not only do I avoid untimely interruptions but it also conceals my location history. Unfortunately my car has a cellular modem built in, but I pretty much disabled it by disconnecting the antenna and replacing it with a dummy load.

413 points by trasz 4y ago

wolongong942 4y ago

So does anybody know from where they are collecting this data?

Calvin02 4y ago
- Public records (property records, dmv, etc.) - Financial institutions/companies (plaid, banks, credit bureau, mortgage providers, reward credit cards, automotive loan providers, etc.) - Loyalty program (macy/nordstorms, safeway, vons, walgreens, etc.) - Warranty providers (appliance & car warranty registrations), etc.. People and media get riled up about Google and Facebook but the data that they have on me is pretty coarse and pales in comparison to what DataLogix, which is a company that Oracle acquired, and other companies have been able to build. We are not rational when it comes to these arguments.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  We always respond to the evil we see, not the evil unseen and looming in the shadows. If you're about to get stung by a scorpion then deal with that before dealing with the lion slowly stalking you.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Well if the goal is better privacy laws, it doesn't really matter who the pitchforks are pointed at since the law affects everyone.
  - Calvin02 4y ago
    That's fair but arguably the value exchange of searching for something and being served ads for that is significantly better than me signing up for a mortgage and now being bombarded by ads for life insurance. Alternative narrative: Google and Facebook are directly threatening news media while DataLogix isn't and therefore doesn't get the attention that it ought to get.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  If they have data of 5 billion people, they must buy it actively from every middleman.
nabakin 4y ago
My question as well
dogman144 4y ago
BlueKai/pixel tracking iirc is a core part, the rest of it is stuff like Bluetooth receivers on top of grocery isles while you have your Bluetooth on, etc.
Labo333 4y ago
A lot of applications sell user data. Like menstrual cycle for Flo, seropositive status for Grindr. A lot of apps sell your location data. Plus there is a very overlooked category of corporate software selling data, like payrolls. This can be used to target you better (eg can you afford that product). Another example is Salesforce selling consumer data to marketing departments: https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-sharing/ https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-sha...

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Fascinating; I never realized Oracle is such a massive player in that space. Ugh :(

ethbr0 4y ago
1. Is it profitable? 2. Is it evil? Then yes, Oracle is a big player in that space.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  > 2. Is it evil? You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawn mower. It's not evil, it just is.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    Not really fitting. Oracle is just a group of people. If you take away the rider, a lawnmower is still a lawnmower. If you take away the employees oracle entirely ceases to exist. You can't hand wave their moral responsibilities as humans.
  - sockaddr 4y ago
    Yes, but the lawnmower was designed and is being pushed by a human (Ellison), no? Then one could say it's an evil tool? It's really not that much of a stretch to anthropomorphize things when we view tools as extensions of ourselves.
    - mintplant 4y ago
      Ellison isn't pushing the lawnmower, he is the lawnmower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
  - sophacles 4y ago
    What's the lawnmower here? The corporation? But corporations are people, so how is treating a person like a person anthropomorphification?

mistrial9 4y ago

on a related note - I picked up a ten year old Mac laptop here in California, let the Chrome browser update itself so HTTPS will work, did a google search for a research paper PDF, and at the bottom of the search page it clearly said -- CityName,ZipCode based on your last activity. Login (the city and zip where I live and sometimes use a Google chromebook for YouTube) this older Mac laptop is not a google computer, no google account active, not logged in. That is a profile indicator, adding to my "dossier." How is this OK now?

vladvasiliu 4y ago
It seems to me that's pretty much the "current" location, since it's the "last used location to call google", which you just did when you did your search.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  no, the "current location" was not listed
rblatz 4y ago
Isn't that just IP Geolocation? That has been common place for at least a decade.
paxys 4y ago
When you visit a website it gets your IP address. It can look up a geolocation database to narrow down the IP to a city/region. You can use an anonymous VPN if you want to prevent this.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  there is difference between "get the IP location now" and "keep every location in a history for this user without consent"
dont__panic 4y ago
If you're using Chrome, you shouldn't be complaining about surveillance. That browser literally identifies everything you do on the internet with a single ID, fed directly to Google. At that point I don't think your IP geolocation is the largest infringement of your personal privacy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

buscoquadnary 4y ago

Oracle is a law firm that has an engineering department attached, and they specialize in proctology.

forinti 4y ago
I think of Oracle as a marketing company with a technology department.
- neodypsis 4y ago
  Isn't it the case that most of their technology nowadays comes from acqui-hiring?
  - neodypsis 4y ago
    Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
blantonl 4y ago
and they specialize in proctology ooof
ThePadawan 4y ago
I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around "engineering". Had a colleague that interned at Oracle and was proud of how he learned to make better Powerpoint slidesets there. His tips included "Always make slide headings full sentences including full stops". He would rename a slide titled "System architecture overview" to "The system architecture is distributed in four microservices.". (This would be above the chart showing the actual architecture) Turns out Oracle execs famously print out slidesets, don't read them, but do read the headings, so this was what he had to do to ..."succeed".
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > I'm going to have to ask you to put quotes around "engineering". I did my PhD at Oracle. We got several top-tier papers from the work we did. There’s excellent engineering at Oracle.

winternett 4y ago

When I go shopping, or even to my doctor now, I leave my phone in my car. I work very hard to not let my phone be required for as many transactions as possible, and write my most important and private thoughts by hand on paper instead of in my phone. People think I'm crazy and paranoid, but their cell phone is probably still tracking me along with store cameras or whatever other BS invasive companies can concoct (less accurately), so at least it's someone else's fault now, rather than being my own. I'll eagerly look forward to getting my $1.39 from the class action suits once the lawyers all get paid.

adolph 4y ago
Why leave it in a car instead of using a Faraday bag? Example product, no affiliation: https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-Phones/dp/B01A7MACL2 https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Darkness-Non-Window-Faraday-P...
blantonl 4y ago
The joke about the $1.39 made me laugh, but it also made me wonder: At what point will there be a tipping point where the pitchforks come out and the general public's "patience" with regulation catching up to this crap begins to unravel and actual violence or "direct action" begins to occur against these actors? Because while we're focused on individual political officials actions as a distraction, these types of warehouses are getting bigger and bigger, making more and more money for the owners, and becoming used more and more for malicious activities.
- archildress 4y ago
  I've thought about this many times, and my answer is: when there is a massive, at-scale leak of seriously disruptive personal information. Think Google search history, medical files, or databases of credit card transactions. When it takes enough peoples' lives off the normal track, people will finally be fed up.
  - zx85wes 4y ago
    The outrage would only be temporary (again). And then things would go back to 'normal'

bitwrangler 4y ago

Many people don't realize that Larry started with CIA and they were his first customer. Maybe his endgame is related to his beginning. https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...

drexlspivey 4y ago
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
- beckingz 4y ago
  Larry "paperclip maximizer" Ellison
- tomxor 4y ago
  Thank you, this made me laugh IRL :D
- exhilaration 4y ago
  For the uninitiated, that's from this video of Bryan Cantrill (from Sun), link goes to the right time: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
And running those databases were Sun machines. Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy's famous comment, "You have no privacy; get over it," is all the more ominous in light of this. The fact that corporations now have all the data on us just brings them into parity with the government. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  What a non American saying. We should exile this traitor.
- 4y ago

potatoman22 4y ago

I wonder if Oracle will leverage their acquisition of Cerner to track people's health data as well.

kaba0 4y ago

Is there a similar one against Facebook, Google, etc?

rvz 4y ago

Good. Time to get the rest of the other Big Tech surveillance machines created by Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Twitter Inc., Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc., and especially, Alphabet Inc. To downvoters: So you want more worldwide surveillance from the Big Tech companies then? Do you trust them not to abuse or collect more of your sensitive data like your passwords, phone numbers, location, etc? That includes TikTok's US 'secure cloud provider', Oracle Inc. Looks like there are lots of users here that are too scared to admit or confess helping the current tech dystopia that they are creating. This lawsuit can only be a good thing in clamping down on the daily mass surveillance done by these companies.

throwaway0asd 4y ago

Potential loss of privacy is inherent upon any data driven economy generally or use of centralized database specifically unless there are specific laws in place to guarantee privacy protections that provide a clear path to enforcement with devastating penalties. You have to incentivize businesses, as data storage entities, by destroying their financial solvency upon the face of privacy violations or privacy will always remain a discarded nuisance much like accessibility.

fartcannon 4y ago
How about publicly shaming the developers who wrote the code to make this possible? Seems only fair, since they voluntarily shared ours private details.
- sillystuff 4y ago
  Apparently some of them see no reason that they should feel shame. See comments on this article from yesterday. A person who used to work at Google in the Adwords group comments extensively on the thread. It was eye opening for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552749 Edit: Note, they have edited some of their comments like their previous response to a comment, "Could it be that you can not understand the harms because you actively took part in creating this reality? I know it's condescending, but it's also human nature. Nobody likes to acknowledge he is a part of something harmful, and to deal with this cognitive dissonance we can put on very powerful blinders." where the previous response was "lol (and something the the effect of, no I don't care)".
  - throwaway0asd 4y ago
    Hypocritically people bitch about intrusive data collection from governments and yet simultaneously give away the same data, and encourage others to do the same, and more to private companies knowing that data will be weaponized against them. As such it’s almost impossible to take any opinion promoting commercial violations of privacy seriously.

ByThyGrace 4y ago

Should I uninstall VirtualBox?

kstrauser 4y ago
If you're using the extension pack for work, and haven't paid for it, probably: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
sysadm1n 4y ago
I look for Oracle-specific traffic on VB and there's no telemetry or anything like that, which is surprising. I'm more concerned about malware escaping sandboxes when analyzing malware than Oracle spying on me through VB
everdrive 4y ago
How troubling

rblion 4y ago

I can't believe Elison 'owns' 99% of Lana'i too.

nojito 4y ago

This data is from an acquisition they made of BlueKai. Not sure why it's hitting the news now. There are equally large datasets available by other entities.

therealmarv 4y ago

What about Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook/Meta?

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

This is how we collectively got here: "This product doesn't work for me, I want something that does." We collectively asked for more product/service diversity, more on-demand personalization and lower prices and we got it. We need to accept that the attention/surveillance economy is a natural outcome of high volume personalized markets. I did my undergraduate thesis on "Nash equilibria to predict consumer decision making under uncertainty" under Dr. Bruce Lister WELL before machine learning was even a core field of Computer Science. People, individuals, you and me, demand increasing determinism from other stochastic humans so that we can better predict and manage our relationships with them. A corporation has the same instinct, so they are doing the reasonable thing and collecting data in order to predict the next state in the Markov Decision Process that is you. Every major technology (and some non-technology) corporation either has built or is building a similar system to optimize you for their system. People have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems because the non-hidden benefits outweigh the hidden risks. For the people that recognize the externalities some are pushing back (like these lawyers), but most people don't even know this is happening and honestly don't care because you get benefits from it. The only thing shocking about this is that Larry said the quiet part out loud

brutusborn 4y ago
I love the part where he said "This is scaring the lawyers. They're shaking their heads and covering their eyes" Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Unlike most public corporations, Larry is Dictator for Life so I don't think he has to ask anyone for permission to do anything.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Makes you wonder how it got past the PR team. Because in most companies the PR team is near the bottom of the list of influence. Only slightly above coders. Certainly well below bean counters, salesfolk, and anyone with a TLA.

kasajian 4y ago

At first I was happy to see this trending as I thought this was going to talk about what I believe. What I believe: The reasons humans are the way we are is because of how natural selection favors survival of those who are better at propagating their genes. All other behaviors tie back to that single need. That criteria are the reasons why we don't want to be "turned off" with a switch. A computer does not evolve in the same way; they don't have that same prime directive. The idea that a computer should be asked if it's ok to be turned off is applying aspects of human condition, sentiency, to an entity to which it does not apply. One can argue that there's no way to prevent the possibility of humans eventually applying such an attribute to an entity that we've created only because that's all we know how to do. In other words, computers won't take over because one day they wake up and become sentient. It will happen because we have decided they should behave exactly as we expect a sentient being ought to behave . Thus, it becomes that way by definition. This article was disappointing -- it went in an entirely different direction. That the math doesn't add up? Really? You can't figure out the math so it can never be done? Kinda hard to take seriously, tbh.

jamiek88 4y ago
Was this the wrong thread you posted in?

yazzku 4y ago

That presentation is utterly disgusting. We are people, not consumers to be spied on.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
maybe better to hate the game more than the individual players
- peteradio 4y ago
  Is that what you say when Dennis Rodman throws Pippen into the stands? This is a thread about a lawsuit after all, the games rules have apparently been violated.
- perlgeek 4y ago
  I have enough hate in me to hate both.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

yazzku 4y ago

Fuck Oracle and surveillance capitalism.

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago

Relevant copypasta: Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality: Data service: The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts. Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (VCC) like at privacy.com. It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. There is also Abine Blur, and some others. Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. You can also buy prepaid VCCs with crypto. All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc. OS: GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can make a secondary profile in which you install Google Play Services to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. Unprivileged here means it's like any other app: if you don't give it access to your location, it won't know where you are. If you end the profile session when you leave, Play Services stops running and stops talking to Google. CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen. LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android. There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e Hardware: CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS. You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you. Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

aprdm 4y ago

I interviewed at Oracle sometime ago, and the product was basically tracking where your eye ball was focusing.. pretty crazy times we live in.

gordaco 4y ago
This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they also disallow alt-tabbing, screenshots and many other basic operations). They are losing a lot of people (including me, very soon) and this is one of the main reasons, but I don't think they have any intention to stop, since this shit has probably been decided several levels above the line managers, who are the ones seeing the mess but don't have much decision power about it. I'd like to think that this insanity will be stopped relatively soon, since tech workers are still in high demand, so people mostly don't put up with this shit. For the vast majority of workers, who don't have that luxury, I don't think they will be able to get rid of this kind of software. Related link from two days ago: an article from Cory Doctorow describing workplace surveillance or "Bossware": https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming-for-you-8720f8d8109f https://doctorow.medium.com/workplace-surveillance-is-coming....

jahewson 4y ago

I’m doubtful about this lawsuit. Talk of “dossiers” is extremely hyperbolic. For those not familiar with it, Oracle’s data platform is effectively a supermarket, stocking the freshest data indexed by “audience” - behavioural interest groups. This data comes from “data providers” - companies who hold data on the behaviours of specific audiences and (are supposed to) have the right to sell it on. They are paid a commission on each sale. Once you understand this then the lawsuit makes less sense - it’s like suing Safeway because you don’t like the ingredients of Cheez-Its. Now, there’s more to it than that, of course, but “some data providers in the marketplace may have issues” is very different from “Oracle has lawless stack of 5bn of dossiers”.

hedora 4y ago
If a picture of Larry Ellison in front of a thirty foot screen with the title "Oracle Data Cloud: 5 billion consumer profiles in database; largest consumer identity graph in the world" isn't enough evidence that they're storing and providing access to consumer dossiers, then what would be?
- jahewson 4y ago
  Lol, that’s Larry’s marketing material. Database = store shelves. Likewise Safeway has thousands of products on its shelves - they don’t make any of them, not even the ones with their brand on.
  - hedora 4y ago
    So, the defense is that he's lying about having access to illegal goods, but selling them anyway. I went down to Safeway yesterday, and bought a kilo of cocaine. It turns out it was ground up sudafed and talcum powder. The cops were like "lolz. that's all on you; it's just how they market these days".
    - jahewson 4y ago
      Huh? He’s just a CEO talking-up his product. Safeway has exclusive deals nowhere else has! Kind of… it’s marketing spin but it’s not a lie. Also having the same data in a database wouldn’t necessarily be illegal, but it would be useless as behavioural data ages-out after 90 days or less.

billsmithaustin 4y ago

Are we really referring to data records as dossiers now? I think of a dossier as a record of things like suspected infidelity or membership in a dangerous political group. Do credit ratings and purchase history really rate as a dossier?

hedora 4y ago
Based on the information in the article, Oracle profiles provide enough information to uncover infidelity and membership in political groups. In particular, they track purchase history, physical location and online telemetry. Their marketing information explicitly says they use the above to build social graphs of consumer profiles. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to prevent that from linking you to your hypothetical mistress and militia buddies. You'd need to not carry a phone, pay with cash, stay masked (that's easy now, I guess) and avoid using a car with a built in cell modem or legible license plates. If Cory Doctorow is to be believed, gait tracking is also a thing now, so rotate through walking with thumb tacks and rocks in one or the other shoe. Even then, you're still thoroughly in Death Note territory where you'll accidentally feed a few (information theoretic) bits of information to the database every once in a while. Also, if you follow all my advice, this XKCD will apply to you: https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/ So, to answer your question, yes.
openfuture 4y ago
Don't you get it.. the dangerous political group is just normal people.. Haven't you been to an airport? or survived this covid period? The fear is proportional to the advantage. If there's a 1000$ behind a door that costs 500$ to open then you open it no? Then the people who own everything must raise the price of opening the door or they'll have mutiny on their hands. We've seen the price steadily go up and it's not a coincidence.

hedora 4y ago

There really need to be minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing, payable direct to consumer. I think $10,000 per offense would be a bit too low. I want to live in a world where shareholders can look at that slide and say: 5 billion victims times $10K means they have amassed $50T in toxic assets. I'm jumping ship, and/or joining a shareholder lawsuit.

kleiba 4y ago

I don't own any kind of mobile device, and many, many times in my life have I gotten the raised eyebrows with a puzzled "you as a computer scientist don't have a phone??". I usually I don't say it out loud but in my head the answer is always "because I am a computer scientist I don't have a phone". I've often wondered why I'm in such a tiny minority even among my CS peers... Then again, at least over here in Europe, new cars will mandatorily have tracking devices built in, so perhaps my whole effort was kinda moot to begin with.

jotm 4y ago

The German gov won't give you your tax return if you don't tell them your current place of residence (abroad, in DE they know everything) lol But yeah, private companies on top of governments is even worse.

hedora 4y ago

OK, so, hypothetically (really, hypothetically), someone caught my eye on the street, so I decided to face recognize them to get their real name and home address, then bought up access to all their credit card statements and their social media friends list. Next, I misrepresented myself to ingratiate myself with their friends, all in order to exploit them financially. I did some other stuff, like track their car, which let me infer all sorts of juicy things about their personal health and private life. I openly bragged about this on data-broker sites, and shared their info (for money) with people with similar interests. They had different end goals in mind, but I don't know what they were, so that's not on me right? Anyway, I managed to net $8 for my trouble, but got caught and they successfully sued me. Should I expect the damages to be more or less than the per-person pay out this lawsuit is likely to generate? How is what Oracle did any different?

hnburnsy 4y ago

Others have said it, but despite all this tracking I rarely see relevant advertising that is even close to targeting me, not on the web, not in my inbox, not on my TV, and not in my mail's box. I even have my YouTubetv set to allow personalized ads but the inserted Google ads are still just mass market ads for cars, movies, and insurance.

alexb_ 4y ago

If privacy is so obviously dead, why stay private? If the battle is You vs Team of Engineers Specifically Trying To Spy On You you are always going to lose. So why even try?

j-bos 4y ago
Because wars are lost when the other side gives up.
sweetbitter 4y ago
Because I'm mostly winning the battle. These people are reduced to performing facial recognition and plate recognition in-person. No active cell modem in the car, no smartphone, and a free-software-only machine emitting just the bytes required to make this post over onion routing.

trustevertone 4y ago

Oracle is evil

cerol 4y ago

With enough data, you can model user behavior pretty accurately. But you can also use the same data to train models that generate valid user behavior patterns. The ad industry is very profitable, but it seems to hang in the balance. Ads are effective as long as data you use to segment users are accurate. What happens if data becomes corrupted? Something like "This Person Does Not Exist" [0], but for user data. Your user behavior just remarkably similar to your actual behavior, but you can filter out the sensitive parts. I'd love to see someone come up with a program or little gadget you can solder to the "smart"-things, and actual usage telemetry will train a locally deployed model that generates user behavior data that is indistinguishable from real user data, only it doesn't say anything about you. [0] https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/

lizardactivist 4y ago

I presume iPhones and "regular" Android phones are the main pipes that fill these databases. It may not be of dire consequence to most of us regular people, but it surprises me that banks, political institutes, corporations, and even governments around the world happily let their people use these phones for work.

Scoundreller 4y ago

I guess if you're in the US, you can request your data here: https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-identity https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-... dunno how it works for anyone anywhere else, but I'm finding out!

natpalmer1776 4y ago
I am receiving "This Service is Currently Unavailable" when submitting the form.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Typical oracle product.

dijonman2 4y ago

I use a faraday bag and keep my phone in it when driving. Not only do I avoid untimely interruptions but it also conceals my location history. Unfortunately my car has a cellular modem built in, but I pretty much disabled it by disconnecting the antenna and replacing it with a dummy load.