Google & Oracle Restricted From Data Mining

Harrison Brown

            Two tech giants, Oracle and Google, have recently sworn off the practice of mining for data on potential jurors. Internet information and activity on jurors can be used by a skilled litigator to determine how to persuade someone and sway them in their favor. Litigators routinely mine the web for this activity that allow them to better understand the insights of their specific jury.  As Google and Oracle prepare to face off in court over a potential copyright infringement dating back to 2010, their decision to respect the privacy of the jury is quite significant.

One point that I’d like to highly emphasize is that neither of the tech giants swore off this practice initially. The judge presiding over the case has been requesting that both companies refrain from excessive data mining of the jury. The judge is quite concerned about how both companies could use this information to sway the jury in their favor. The judge gave both companies an ultimatum and informed them that they can either consent to the ban or disclose the information that they have discovered. When both companies decided to consent to the ban I feel like that should be a red flag in and of itself. Both of these companies have so much power and little regulation that they could potentially unearth very private information about the jury and use this to leverage their position. If they consented to a ban, then they must have been digging around in information that they shouldn’t have been looking at. I feel as though this is one aspect that the article neglected and overlooked. It seems pretty obvious to me that if both companies quickly decided to consent to the ban given the two options then they must have seriously been opposed to releasing the information that they had been mining.

Additionally, I’d like to note that Google has been mostly transparent from the beginning and had been willing to accept the ban under one circumstance and that is if the ban applied to both companies. It took until this past Thursday to get Oracle onboard with the ban. Oracle released a brief statement saying “Oracle consents to the Court’s proposed ban on all juror research, including internet and social media research and research using proprietary sources of information.” It is important to recognize that this ban far exceeds guidelines that are already in place and I believe that this ban is totally warranted. If these companies can research critical information on a jury with null supervision, then they can use such information for blackmail.

This article and this situation brings to light how far Oracle and Googles power truly extends. All of your private information that is floating about in the web could easily be mined by both companies and used against you without you even knowing. It seems to me that this ban could be the beginning in a long list of bans and regulations placed on these giants.

URL:http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/04/01/google-and-oracle-agree-not-to-research-jurors-online-ahead-of-major-trial/?mod=ST1