Article:
Oracle Didn’t See the Data Reckoning Coming By Nico Grant

The company quietly laid off staffers tracking people around the web to sell Facebook ads.

`Over the last five years, spending billions of dollars, Oracle has been honing its skills at following  individuals around the web. Since 2014, it has acquired six companies totaling $3 billion which helped make it a major name in the field of advertising. That is an innocuous term for a devious practice of gathering up private information and selling it to huge brand name advertisers.

The company has confronted intense scrutiny over practices in its promoting programming division, known as Data Cloud. While Data Cloud has always been a little piece of Oracle’s bottom line, officials more than once referred to it throughout the years as a brilliant spot in their business. This is changing due to the growing public concern about what companies were doing with personal data.

Companies supplying Oracle and other businesses with profile data has declined by as much as half in recent months since many of those companies couldn’t comply with Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation.

According to Privacy International. “We don’t know what’s going to happen from a public perception and regulatory standpoint,” says Frank, the ISG analyst. “But I think it’s clear we’re not in 2015 anymore.”