Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online

guest · Jun 19, 2020

Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online
Billions of records exposed
June 19, 2020
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/oracle-bluekai-web-tracking/

Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about?
There’s no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate.

Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of dollars buying startups to build its very own panopticon of users’ web browsing data.

One of those startups, BlueKai, which Oracle bought for a little over $400 million in 2014, is barely known outside marketing circles, but it amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government.
BlueKai uses website cookies and other tracking tech to follow you around the web.
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But for a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find.

Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle through an intermediary — Roi Carthy, chief executive at cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock and former TechCrunch reporter.
But the sheer size of the exposed database makes this one of the largest security lapses this year.
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‘No telling how revealing’
Behind the scenes, BlueKai continuously ingests and matches as much raw personal data as it can against each person’s profile, constantly enriching that profile data to make sure it’s up to date and relevant.
But it was that raw data spilling out of the exposed database.

TechCrunch found records containing details of private purchases. One record detailed how a German man, whose name we’re withholding, used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site on April 19. The record also contained the man’s address, phone number and email address.
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Trackers, trackers everywhere
BlueKai is everywhere — even when you can’t see it.

One estimate says BlueKai tracks over 1% of all web traffic — an unfathomable amount of daily data collection — and tracks some of the world’s biggest websites: Amazon, ESPN, Forbes, Glassdoor, Healthline, Levi’s, MSN.com, Rotten Tomatoes, and The New York Times. Even this very article has a BlueKai tracker because our parent company, Verizon Media, is a BlueKai partner.
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Rasheed187 · Jun 20, 2020

I'm guessing that this can be stopped by for example uBlock?

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Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online

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Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online

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