Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America, Inc.

District Court, N.D. California·Decided April 6, 2023·No. 3:22-cv-04792·Unknown

Opinion

MICHAEL KATZ-LACABE, et al., Case No. 22-cv-04792-RS Plaintiffs, v. ORDER GRANTING IN PART AND DENYING IN PART MOTION TO ORACLE AMERICA, INC., DISMISS Defendant.

Three individual plaintiffs bring this putative class action against Oracle America, Inc. (“Defendant” or “Oracle”), alleging the company violates internet users’ right to privacy, as provided under the California Constitution and various state and federal privacy statutes. Defendant moves to dismiss under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6) for lack of standing and failure to state a claim, as well as failure to comply with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8. In addition, Oracle moves for an order striking portions of the Complaint pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(f), as well as for judicial notice of several documents in support of its motion to dismiss. For the reasons that follow, the request for judicial notice is granted in part and denied in part; the motion to dismiss is granted in part and denied in part; and the motion to strike is denied. II. BACKGROUND1 1 The factual background is based on the well-pled allegations in the complaint, which are taken as Plaintiffs in this case are three named individuals—Michael Katz-Lacabe, a resident of San Leandro, California; Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, a resident of Sugarloaf Key, Florida; and Dr. Johnny Ryan, a resident of Dublin, Ireland—who purportedly represent five separate classes of individuals in a suit against Oracle. Plaintiffs’ Complaint alleges that, “despite taking precautions to keep [their] personal information” private, Plaintiffs received a document from Oracle indicating that the company had tracked, compiled, and analyzed their web browsing and other activity, thereby creating an “electronic profile” on them. Dkt. 1 at 2-4. Plaintiffs take issue with Oracle’s extensive data brokering business—and in particular, two key features of Defendant’s data management platform (BlueKai Data Management Platform): (1) the Oracle Data Marketplace, allegedly one of the world’s largest commercial data exchanges; and (2) the Oracle ID Graph, a product designed to “match[] individual customer identities . . . and combin[e] them into a single consistent and accurate customer profile.” Dkt. 1 at 7. According to Plaintiffs, Defendant’s business model proceeds as follows: first, it collects as many types of personal information from internet users as possible. Then Defendant synchronizes that data to create individual profiles, and ultimately sells that data—bolstered by data made available by its partners—on its Data Marketplace. A. Oracle’s Alleged Data Collection As Plaintiffs explain, Defendant’s vast data accumulation is made possible by both Defendant’s own technologies and the acquisition of data from other parties. In the former category, Defendant employs seven technologies, including: (1) cookies (pieces of software code stored on web browsers that collect users’ data, like IP addresses); (2) the javascript code “bk- coretag.js” (proprietary code which copies and sends to Oracle what information users are requesting from a website server, such as a URL, date and time of visit, and webpage keywords); (3) tracking pixels (code embedded into webpages that track information whenever the webpage is opened); (4) device identification; (5) cross-device tracking; (6) AddThis widgets; and (7) Datalogix (an information broker specializing in profiles built from brick and mortar purchases). Allegedly “ubiquitous throughout the Internet,” this data collection requires no relationship between the internet user and Oracle to occur. Given this lack of privity, users “may not know Oracle is amassing data about them.” Dkt. 1 at 12. Defendant next uses its Oracle ID Graph to aggregate and synchronize the collected data to perform “identity resolution.” This process takes three steps: (1) filtering and combining data from its various sources to identify and establish “a single, universal view of identity” for each user, across devices and marketing channels; (2) applying analytics to that raw data to develop insights about users and create segments along dimensions such as life events (e.g., marriage), education, purchase history, or even health and wellness (e.g., weight, sleep habits, and categories like “Aging & Geriatrics” and “Pain Relief”); and (3) matching data provided by customers to existing profiles that Defendant has developed and maintains in its Oracle Data Cloud, which helps “knit together” information from Defendant’s own data sources. Finally, Plaintiffs allege that Defendant’s Data marketplace “is an online store owned and operated by Oracle where Oracle facilitates the buying and selling of data and data-derived services by Oracle” and its partners. Dkt. 1 at 26. This Marketplace trades in personal data Oracle collects itself, personal data that private companies collect from their own users and sell directly to Oracle’s clients, and personal data that other third-party data brokers collect and sell to Oracle clients on the Marketplace. Defendant partners with over sixty-five “major brokers of third party data” in the Database, which allows it to profit from the sale of allegedly sensitive personal information including race, location, politics, and medical information. Id. at 33. With all of the available data, Defendant’s products allow its clients to “analyze, segment, and target” users based on the information, including the categories of sensitive information outlined above. B. Defendant’s Privacy Policies & Plaintiffs’ Lack of Consent Plaintiffs further allege that neither Oracle’s privacy policies, nor the policies of internet publishers, could provide any basis for Plaintiffs to have consented to the extensive data collection and profiling scheme described. Oracle’s website leads to seven different privacy policies, which Plaintiffs describe as “convoluted, opaque, and not reasonably comprehensible to the average Internet user,” Dkt. 1 at 43, and which Plaintiffs attack as failing to disclose what Oracle does with internet users’ information in any meaningful way. By way of example, Plaintiffs point to the Oracle Advertising Privacy Policy, which states that “Oracle does not create any online interest segments that reflect personal information that is sensitive,” and includes in the category of sensitive information “certain aspects linked to personal life, such as racial or ethnic, religious, political, citizenship, immigration status, or sexual orientation.” Dkt. 1 at 44; Oracle Advertising Privacy Policy, https://www.oracle.com/legal/privacy/advertising-privacy-policy.html. Plaintiffs allege that Defendant’s practices are actually contrary to the reasonable reader’s inference, from reading the policy, that Oracle would not facilitate the sale of their political views. Article III of the U.S. Constitution authorizes the judiciary to adjudicate only “cases” and “controversies.” The doctrine of standing is “an essential and unchanging part of the case-or- controversy requirement of Article III.” Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992). Defendant moves to dismiss on the basis that Plaintiffs lack standing under Rule 12(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. A 12(b)(1) motion to dismiss a complaint challenges the court’s subject matter jurisdiction over the asserted claims. It is the plaintiff’s burden to prove jurisdiction at the time the action is commenced. Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330, 338 (2016).

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Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America, Inc., (N.D. Cal. 2023).

Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America, Inc. (Katz-Lacabe v. Oracle America, Inc.) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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