It seems like the sole purpose of palantir is to give data to the government they wouldnt have access to without a warrant. So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled??? The difference between now and a few years ago seems to be that companies are assisting law enforcement with even more advanced datacollection.
This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.
The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.
Yes.. but.. have you seen the DOW?
There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.
I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.
As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".
I don't want to see any more landmark cases from the current supreme court.
Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)
A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.
This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.
Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.
And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
> Palantir gives the health data to government
Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it
The problem with today's society is you walk into a hospital bleeding and they make you sign an ultimatum.
Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.
If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.
in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.
>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.
What people have "willingly" given their data directly to any company? It's usually buried in an agreement or hidden behind some dark pattern.
Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them.
Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.
> So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled???
It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.
correct
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
How is it guaranteed to be the same accuracy of data that is not retrieved through a warrant ?
Parallel construction. They get enough data, legal or not, to know who to look for. Then they surveil you until you slip.
It just needs to be accurate-enough to eventually get a warrant.
you don't need warrants to query these databases
They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data
You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.
If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
Right, I understand they don't need a warrant for the databases. I'm saying that they use the databases to get enough data for a warrant that they wouldn't be able to get without the databases.
I keep thinking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Illegal data gathering was a big deal only 10 years ago. It seems like with businesses like Palantir that this behavior has been normalized to the point where what was unthinkably bad 10 years ago is just business as usual today.
It’s more that many adult citizens (and increasing every year) have grown up with the patriot act and liberties being stripped away in the name of security.
I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.
It is like 1984. But shit.
It's wild they we are happily buying telescreens. Who would have imagined pre-2000s that would actually happen. And that the number one defense of capitalism would be to use telescreens as an example 'but look at how cheap your telescreen is, TVs were so expensive'.
Well, you know it's that time again...
In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;
In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!
It's a software company, it sells software. You can literally go read the docs. It doesn't magically bypass the law anymore than Microsoft Sharepoint does.
Do you expect palantir's public documentation to explain how they operate as a spy agency?
It's a huge company with loads of corporate clients... has anybody found any evidence of some secret backdoor? Or are we just speculating?
> has anybody found any evidence..or are we just speculating?
that’s what the article is discussing? the journalists found evidence.
i’m confused what you’re confused about.
this whole entire comment section is birthed from the evidence someone found.
Sorry, where? Maybe I've missed something, but the article is just about their health business growing in New York rather than an illegal data backdoors?
They don't need a backdoor, the whole company is a backdoor receiving sensitive information from governments 24x7.
So Palantir receives info from governments only to… hand it back to them? It seems like most people really don’t know what Palantir actually does and are just speculating.
No, we know very well how they operate. They're paid to get all kinds of sensitive information from governments and other institutions around the world and store it in their very "secure" data centers. Once there, the US government can easily get any of that information for "national security reasons", because how would they say otherwise, and the Israeli government can do the same as well without even announcing anything, because how would the US government ever say "no" to them... It's all just obvious at this point.
Your link and description of it as a software company are irrelevant to the discussion, which concerns their retention and use of personal data. I welcome anyone to give their disclosure a critical reading. (They promise to follow the law- whew!)
You mean the logging of their web traffic and communications with them like every corporate website does? Can you specify?
A system of corruption - get money from taxpayers, put it into private companies, private companies yield goodies to lobbyists disguised as "politicians". How to break up this milking scheme?
Palantir is a threat to all American privacy and likely Democracy given Thiel wants to tear it down and owns Palantir.
This is why government and corporations should not be embedded together as they have near zero laws or punishment for spying on Americans.
It isn't even just about the invasion of our rights but the government shouldn't choose winners and losers like we are seeing. It eliminates the open nature of competition.
Take the following crude entities:
- Stones
- Sticks
- Some rope
Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies.
Now take the benign elements of a crud stack:
- Database
- Server
- User system
It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that.
Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me
Right?
Bleach and Ammonia are perfectly shelf stable on their own. Mix them up and they're literal poison.
What you've described are just benign ingredients. The poison is turning them into a "analytics" or "adtech" system.
Are there any demos of Palantir out there, what sort of things does it do and has anyone tried making an OSS alternative - I don’t really understand why any government would trust them.
AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems.
The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.
They dump all your stuff into a schemaless database and then attach widgets to it.
That's literally it.
It's not even particularly good technology.
So, they’re basically a traditional consultancy firm focused on data analytics, particularly record linkage?
And methodically operationalizing client work into products.
If that's an accurate description it's very puzzling that European countries buy services from them.
It is a selective description.
FDE is not the only thing they sell.
Software Licenses for their products (Gotham/Foundry/AIP) is why countries (and businesses) deal with them.
They have an entire youtube channel. For example, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms
Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.
The government IS Palantir at this point, at least J.D. Vance was hand-picked by Thiel.
Musk+Thiel is also in the mix with Golden Dome, the space weapons program that was always Musk's mission. The inside "joke" is that Mars = Wars.
And Golden Dome is just the reheated leftovers of the 80s Star Wars space-based scheme literally dreamed up by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller, and promoted by the Heritage Society as a way to get past MAD and allow the US to start and win WWIII. These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
> These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.
They already are.. but.. have you seen the DOW?
Michael Burry is extremely bearish on their business model and has written excellent pieces on why he is shorting Palantir.
The valuation is obviously insane. You can't have that kind of P/E ratios.
Same thing with Tesla.
Burry is probably right, but he forgets that Thiel is friends with Trump, so the merits of business don't matter for Palantir to secure lucrative government contracts.
What’s there to trust? You use a tool, it finds things you did that you didn’t bill for, you get paid. Where in this is trust required? The guy you’re billing will complain if the bills are inaccurate.
No one can explain what it is. They have some bullshit “ontology” thing they talk up on every investor call and bots spam about it on twitter and reddit. I think they are basically a software consultancy firm that the government can outsource all evil deeds to. Like warrantless surveillance
Their "ontology" is not bullshit but they speak about it in a bullshit way. I think they refer to it like a product or something they invented as a form of marketing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)
If you just google ontology you probably end up reading some Heidegger and conclude how deep these guys must be.
Whenever I hear Karp say it I always think of it like he is saying "Database" or "The Database". "What makes Palantir different is Database".
I think so much of Palantir is performative and for sales performances.
You can just go sign up...?
So they get paid to steal personal data? What a deal!
Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…
On the contrary, I think it's [pleasantly] surprising that YCombinator threads have finally stopped misunderstanding Palantir.
God knows it took long enough.
Ok so explain then… this is a forum for discussion after all.