ESPN Website Wiretaps Visitors with Oracle’s BlueKai Pennsylvania Class Action

The ESPN.com website is owned by the Walt Disney Company. The complaint for this class action alleges that Disney wiretaps the communications of the website’s visitors, with the help of Oracle America, Inc.’s BlueKai Pixel. BlueKai, the complaint claims, intercepts and records information about visitors and the moves they make at the website, in violation of the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act (WESCA).

The class for this action is all Pennsylvania residents who visited ESPN.com in Pennsylvania and whose electronic communications were intercepted or recorded by Oracle.

Oracle offers Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (Oracle CX) products. The complaint quotes Oracle’s website as saying that these products can be used to “[b]uild a complete view of your customer and their every interaction—no matter how, when, where, or with whom they engage.” Among these products is BlueKai, a marketing tool that collects data.

BlueKai is offered as a data management platform (DMP) that “[c]ollects, organizes, and activates audience data from various online, offline, and mobile sources. Using that data, [website owners] can then build detailed customer profiles for targeted advertising and personalization initiatives.”

How is the data collected? Disney puts into its webpages and applications a Core Tag that is invisible to users. The Core Tag facilitates communications between visitors’ website browsers and Oracle, and Oracle uses the Core Tag to collect data and “to extract the website visitor user attributes.”

BlueKai collects such things as pages viewed, keystrokes, mouse clicks, and something called “purchase intent.” About purchase intent, the complaint quotes Oracle as saying, “Purchase behavior insight enables [website owners] to understand your audience’s buying habits, based on actual purchase data sourced from Oracle Data Cloud partners.”

After that, the complaint alleges, Core Tag generates a “unique user ID” for the visitor and an “Oracle ID Graph” that can be used to identify users across different devices. The complaint claims, “Oracle correlates visitors’ web activity with the ID and create[s] a ‘segment’ profile of the visitor. Oracle then feeds the visitor advertisements that match the visitor’s purported segment profile.”

The complaint makes a further, possibly more disturbing allegation: “Oracle does not simply manage their clients’ data, Oracle also retains and uses the same data to assist other clients. … Because BlueKai’s success depends on their data accumulation, Oracle does not merely profit monetarily from each client, but also builds BlueKai’s profiling apparatus.” In other words, the complaint claims Oracle keeps the data collected from one website and uses it to help other website owners.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Privacy
Tags: Recording Electronic Communications Without Consent, Sharing Personal Information with Third Parties, Your Privacy, wiretapping