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Palantir is a real threat to liberty, I am surprised to see so many “freedom” types support them. This update illustrates how important control is to the found
by glenda 6y ago
Palantir is a real threat to liberty, I am surprised to see so many “freedom” types support them.
This update illustrates how important control is to the founders.
- trowaway888 6y agoGenuinely curious, how is Palantir a threat to liberty?
- smt88 6y agoThey are a highly-secretive company that sell secret digital surveillance services to governments, including law enforcement. As a private company, they're not subject to FOIA requests the same way govt orgs (including military, with obvious redactions) are.
- manfredo 6y agoI don't think it's correct to say that they sell surveillance services. When I think of "surveillance" I think it means data collection. Palantir doesn't build data collection tools, they build data visualization tools. The government already has the data, Palantir builds a tool to better browse that data. The tool Palantir replaces if often Microsoft Excel. Does it follow that Excel is a digital surveillance tool?
- NationalPark 6y agoYou've made this distinction a couple times in these comments and I just don't buy it. If Palantir doesn't provide any value, why does the government keep hiring them to build "visualizations" of domestic surveillance tools? I think we can both oppose this kind of policy politically, and rightfully call out the companies and the individual engineers who do this kind of anti-privacy work.
- manfredo 6y agoThe ability to better visualize this info, is the value. Governments are willing to pay for Palantir because doing things tracking down pill mills is easier if you can perform operations like filtering for people that bought the same drug twice in a day, and then plotting those purchases on map. It's a lot harder to do this kind of analysis with Excel.
- smt88 6y agoSo what if Palantir is selling facial recognition software? That's technically the same: post-processing (video) data that the government has already collected. Or what if they are doing predictive crime? Or tracking suspected criminals across marketing data sets? Surveillance is dangerous at its core because it gives the govt power to target one or more people. If Palantir is doing that (and it is), then it has the same potential for harm as any other surveillance product.
- trowaway888 6y agoIsn't their secretiveness equivalent to your privacy? I don't know what an FOIA request is, but maybe they should be, maybe not, I don't know.
- polynomial 6y agoThis seems like a fair question. Is hn no longer a space for discussion?
- edoceo 6y agoIt is. But @trowaway888 is a 35 minute old throwaway sea-lion account - they're not interested in discussion
- kbenson 6y agoWhether they are interested or not, they aren't the only person that will see the reply. Sea-lioning seems to work best when people have left their reasoning out. For a site like this, sea-lioning at the base level is probably a public service. It's when it's used against people that have already explained themselves that it's problematic.
- polynomial 6y agoInteresting, I learned a new word today. Would the repeated questioning of Trump about White Supremacy fall under this trope?
- kbenson 6y agoHonestly, I heard it for the first time within the last week myself. While I'm sure it is a problem in some cases, so far I've seen more people complaining about sea-lioning than actual cases where it was both obvious it was being used as a tactic and negative. As for Trump, maybe I could see it if he didn't stumble or fail to answer half the time, and come up with a controversial and ambiguous answer the rest of the time, and didn't spend of lot of effort communicating what seems like the opposite of his official answers on his own time? He's not the kind of person it's easy to say has a specific opinion or stance since he's contradicting himself constantly and revising earlier statements by saying they were jokes, but then later they were jokes but not really.... So who knows.
- polynomial 6y ago
- noozirul 6y agoplease tell us what palantir did that google or even the nba doesn't
- prepend 6y agoI’ve seen similar comments come up and have been trying to understand if there’s something specific to Palantir, or just data analysis in general. From my limited analysis and use of Palantir, it’s just a data management and analysis stack like so many others (SAS, SAP, alteryx, RStudio, etc) and similar to stuff that AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle offer as well. In that it’s just a giant bucket of data with ways to link it and connect it. Is there something special about how Palantir does it that makes it better at analyzing data and thus more of a threat? What’s weird about using it is that it just seems to be a specific way (like so many others) of just scaling up what I’ve seen for decades of making big databases and using them.
- trowaway888 6y agoThis is my understanding as well, which is why I was hoping someone on HN might be able to clarify OP's claim it's threat to liberty. Instead I am being downvoted. Is there no room for genuine curiosity on HN?
- glenda 6y agoI think what’s specific to Palantir is their insistence on working with only organizations like DHS and law enforcement. Intelligence data fusion centers are used to compile data from various agencies and they’re stocked with tools like Palantir and Dataminr but IBM, Microsoft and all the usual players also offer fusion center data management products which I would consider to be just as harmful.
- trowaway888 6y agoI think that statement is inaccurate. They do not work with only organizations like DHS and law enforcement. In general, I think roughly 40-60% of their work is with what you described and the rest is commercial entities. I imagine many vendors service organizations like DHS and law enforcement. Are they all threats to liberty? In concrete terms, what is the threat, or why are they a threat to liberty?
- glenda 6y ago
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoControl is important to governments.
- trowaway888 6y agoYour statement is true. However, I think broadly, control is important. In this case, we are talking about Founders maintaining control, creating mechanisms to avoid a loss of control, under circumstances where control might be at risk. This seems reasonable. I am also not aware of how Founders maintaining control is a threat to liberty.
- fnord77 6y agomany of these "freedom" types only care about a narrow set of freedoms for themselves. They're actually quite fond of authoritarian systems.
- manfredo 6y agoI've found that people who make this kind of statements often aren't familiar with the kind of work Palantir does. Palantir doesn't collect any information. They build tools for the government to browse information they already have. For example they build a tool to visualize the flow of monetary transactions between different people as a graph. They didn't collect this information, the government already has this information on financial transactions. Whether or not Palantir existed, the government collects the same information. Sometimes people make the argument that building better tools to make correlations between these pieces of information amounts to a threat to privacy. But that seems like a much weaker argument to me. The government already has the information being analyzed with Palantir, and if the people don't think the government should have this information we have mechanisms in place to remove leaders and elect ones that will eliminate this data collection.
- Analemma_ 6y agoDecreasing the cost of government mass surveillance by developing more efficient tools to do it will inevitably increase the amount/scope of surveillance. This is Econ 101: as cost goes down, demand goes up. Claiming that you aren't responsible for increased privacy intrusion just because you built the tools to do it cheaply and then handed the actual operation off to someone else is is a despicable abdication of obvious responsibility.
- ffggvv 6y agosure but then by that logic so does building more powerful computers. so intel and nvidia and amd employees are also evil. and don’t forget building a more efficient operating system
- wait_a_minute 6y agoIf we will generalize about "freedom" types supporting Palantir, allow me to generalize about the opposite as well - the people who never care about pro-privacy and anti-censorship matters, unless they believe there's an angle from which they can attack "American imperialism" or the "industrial-military complex" or what have you. I suspect the only reason some people get upset about Palantir is because they provide tools to the government and military, and it is popular to bash the American government and the American military. At least on the left, where building software for national security is seen in the same light as supporting hegemony and imperialism. I am skeptical about the people who complain about liberty or democracy being at risk because of Palantir, Facebook, etc, because my experience with these people has been that they are never anti-censorship, pro-democracy except when it suits their own partisan side. They'll easily welcome censorship if it means Facebook shutting down "dangerous" groups, where dangerous is any group that is not their group.