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.
There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.
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".
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!)
The data laundering aspect of this is what concerns me most. The constitutional framework was designed around a world where gathering information about citizens required effort and left a trail. Now the economics have flipped - collection is cheap and invisible, and the only friction is legal, which gets routed around by purchasing from intermediaries.
Healthcare data is especially sensitive because it creates coercion vectors that other data types do not. If you know someone's diagnosis, their medication, their hospital visits, you can apply pressure in ways that go far beyond targeted advertising. This is why HIPAA exists, and why routing around it via a government contractor should trigger much more scrutiny than it currently receives.
The technical reality is that once data is aggregated at scale, the original context of collection becomes irrelevant. It does not matter that each individual piece was collected for a legitimate purpose. The aggregate creates capabilities that none of the individual collection points consented to.
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.
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
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.
There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.
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".
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
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.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry
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?
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.
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!)
https://www.palantir.com/privacy-and-security/
You mean the logging of their web traffic and communications with them like every corporate website does? Can you specify?
The data laundering aspect of this is what concerns me most. The constitutional framework was designed around a world where gathering information about citizens required effort and left a trail. Now the economics have flipped - collection is cheap and invisible, and the only friction is legal, which gets routed around by purchasing from intermediaries.
Healthcare data is especially sensitive because it creates coercion vectors that other data types do not. If you know someone's diagnosis, their medication, their hospital visits, you can apply pressure in ways that go far beyond targeted advertising. This is why HIPAA exists, and why routing around it via a government contractor should trigger much more scrutiny than it currently receives.
The technical reality is that once data is aggregated at scale, the original context of collection becomes irrelevant. It does not matter that each individual piece was collected for a legitimate purpose. The aggregate creates capabilities that none of the individual collection points consented to.
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?
https://archive.is/bK8xU
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.
So, they’re basically a traditional consultancy firm focused on data analytics, particularly record linkage?
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.
Michael Burry is extremely bearish on their business model and has written excellent pieces on why he is shorting Palantir.
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 the mission. The inside "joke" is that Mars = Wars.
You can just go sign up...?
https://www.palantir.com/developers/
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
https://archive.is/bK8xU
Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…
Ok so explain then… this is a forum for discussion after all.