Posting from a throwaway: I’ve been doing work in the realm of Covid for basically the last year. Part of that privilege is access to HHS Protect, as managed b

Posting from a throwaway: I’ve been doing work in the realm of Covid for basically the last year. Part of that privilege is access to HHS Protect, as managed by Palantir. Just to soothe some unknowns, Covid surveillance is nothing like the kind of military surveillance described in this article. There is no personally identifiable data and certainly no effort to trace individuals with Covid. The actual data inside HHS protect is not much more specific than what is publicly available. Covid tests/cases/deaths by county, locations of long term care facilities, pharmacies, hospitals. Data on supplies, hospitalizations, staffing. Demographic data comes straight from Census data, also still aggregated. In addressing Covid, I often wish we had better data. Google and Apple’s earlier plan to anonymously contact trace is far more “creepy” than anything the federal government currently has. As you’ll notice, that tech got basically no traction. Contact tracing has largely been a failure in the US, but that’s a whole other story. Do you really think that Covid would have hit the US as intensely as it did if we had military level surveillance? I don’t. Many points of inaction are due to unclear or insufficient data. On the other hand, the raw data available to Google, Apple, Facebook and others is insane to me. Your phone is your tracking device. These companies have it as a unique identifier and most definitely track a large number of users in an individually identifiable way. The carriers do this as well. I absolutely agree that we need refrain allowing this technology to be used in domestic policing, but in terms of war I see it a net positive. Data drives insight which drives action. Palantir just happened to build one of the best platforms to do this. (You may disagree with any of the above, that is fine)