4 ms·

Genuinely curious, how is Palantir a threat to liberty?

smt88 6y ago
They 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    You'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 ago
      The 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 ago
    So 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 ago
  Isn'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 ago
This seems like a fair question. Is hn no longer a space for discussion?
- edoceo 6y ago
  It is. But @trowaway888 is a 35 minute old throwaway sea-lion account - they're not interested in discussion
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Whether 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 ago
      Interesting, I learned a new word today. Would the repeated questioning of Trump about White Supremacy fall under this trope?
      - kbenson 6y ago
        Honestly, 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

They 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 ago
I 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 ago
  You'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 ago
    The 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 ago
  So 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 ago
Isn'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 ago

This seems like a fair question. Is hn no longer a space for discussion?

edoceo 6y ago
It is. But @trowaway888 is a 35 minute old throwaway sea-lion account - they're not interested in discussion
- kbenson 6y ago
  Whether 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 ago
    Interesting, I learned a new word today. Would the repeated questioning of Trump about White Supremacy fall under this trope?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Honestly, 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