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Pre IPO ex Palantir here. Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract
by TriangleEdge 3y ago
Pre IPO ex Palantir here.
Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract, and they'll target them specifically. For example: if they know you take the train to work every morning, and read the news paper, they'll take a full page advertisement on the paper they know you like and that you'll see. They gain this information by, you guessed it, spying on their targets.
- ramesh31 3y agoMust respectfully say that this company should not be allowed to exist. We are outsourcing state level powers to a completely opaque private entity with zero accountability. This can only end badly.
- redcobra762 3y agoWhat does “state level powers” even mean? And they’re hardly “opaque”, at least not any more than any other publicly traded company is, and held to similar account. What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? I wonder if you’re falling for a lot of the marketing hype…
- p_j_w 3y ago> they’re hardly “opaque”, at least not any more than any other publicly traded company is Publicly traded companies are required to report certain financial facts about the company, but they’re still extremely opaque.
- redcobra762 3y agoYes, as a publicly traded company, but not especially so amongst those.
- Barrin92 3y ago>What does “state level powers” even mean? In this case espionage and surveillance, traditionally domains of the state. >What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? They're not subject to privacy legislation and limitations that the police is. There's a concrete exapmle of this, commercial storage of license plate data in the US is largely unregulated, so police units that have legal limitations on how long they can hold citizen data simply go to the private market and buy that data from those firms. That kind of circumvention of the law and outsourcing of responsibility is probably a large part of the Palantir business model. Seems kind of insane to take your tax payer money and use it to buy surveillance data on you, a good chunk of which probably isn't even legal to otherwise collect and completely undermine the rule of law and democratic control of policing.
- redcobra762 3y agoEspionage and surveillance is a misrepresentation of what Palintir does; every Fortune 500 company does similar if we use this definition. And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard, just like you or I aren’t held to that standard.
- Barrin92 3y ago>And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mostly for police or defense work. That's not how you, I or most Fortune 500 companies do business. [1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict... [2]https://youtu.be/rxKghrZU5w8 https://youtu.be/rxKghrZU5w8
- redcobra762 3y agoIt’s in no way a strong claim, as the cleaning services of the New Orleans Police Department are also not police. And it absolutely is how you, I, and every other employed organization works. You seem to not understand what a contractor is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- staplers 3y agoSounds like the perfect way for federal agencies to workaround the dirty work they can't legally do.
- steve1977 3y agoNothing new then.
- fnorder 3y agoI agree with you, but every reason you just listed is a positive from the perspective of their customers. I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.
- kurthr 3y agoOr they can go the other direction and offer foreign powers protection for money. The incentives are aligned that way so it would require surveillance and conspiracy to prevent it from happening. Furthermore, collecting large amounts of information on your own population creates a lowest effort point of entry for an adversary to gather that info, and it's more useful to them.
- TriangleEdge 3y agoAnother tactic, for example, is learn what your MBTI is and tailor stories that resonate with your personality.
- morelisp 3y agoI'm sure Palantir is up to just as much shit in its sales division as it is in its actual work, but normal human beings just call changing your communication style and content in response to the listener's reactions "having a conversation".
- anigbrowl 3y agoNormal humans don't try to communicate directly with each other through the media.
- tptacek 3y agoHave you ever been on public transit in DC? There are billboards all over the place (or were a decade ago when I was there last) that are clearly sales efforts targeting like 4 people. It's not that weird.
- csteubs 3y agoExtremely accurate. L3Harris pumped so much ad money into the walkways at Dulles I'm surprised they don't have naming rights to a terminal. There was a time not too long ago where you couldn't listen to WTOP without hearing Mitre and ManTech ads with the term "Digital Twin".
- tptacek 3y agoWhich like, seems entirely rational? You're a sales team pursuing a deal with an 8-9 figure outcome, of course you would buy a billboard on on the decision maker's commute, it's a rounding error expense.
- noodlesUK 3y agoThis doesn’t even begin to surprise me. Even on a tiny scale, myself and a couple of the other top students at our university got an unsolicited phone call from palantir about 10 min after we finished our last exams congratulating us on finishing university and encouraging us to apply to Palantir. They had clearly gotten access to our exam timetable so they could call us right after we had finished. It was deeply creepy, and left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.
- neilv 3y agoSounds like a good filter for culture: discourage the people who wouldn't be onboard with company approaches, and simultaneously attract the people who want to be a part of the power that the company just flexed a tiny bit.
- mdhb 3y agoI imagine after thinking about it for more than thirty seconds some rather obvious problems begin to emerge with this approach.
- neilv 3y agoWhat's an example problem? (Something about building a company of power-seeking people who don't notice, or aren't bothered by, ethical questionability? Some companies have herded those well enough, and thrived for decades, like that.)
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoIt's a slimy company with one very slimy founder in particular. That we fund this company with our taxes is repugnant.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 7thaccount 3y agoThey seem sketchy just based off their name from the LOTR object. From Wikipedia: "A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to "possess great strength of will and of mind" to direct the stone's gaze to its full capability.[T 2] The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable. Commentators such as the Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda"
- itronitron 3y agoFrom my understanding, Palantir is mostly successful because of it's utility as a data aggregator within an organization. So yeah, you have to know how to use the tools available but it's not going to stop anyone from coming to the wrong conclusion.
- 7thaccount 3y agoI was mainly saying that if you've watched the LOTR films, the Palantir (where I assume they got the name) has a pretty negative conatation and to willingly take it makes me wonder.
- bostik 3y agoAs life imitates art, the lines between paranoid conspiracy theories and marketing campaigns continue to blur.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoThis is not something new. A good enterprise sales team does the same thing: they learn about the organization, the gatekeepers, the decision makers, how to get past / around the gatekeepers to reach the decision makers, and finally convince the decision makers that they are the best solution. The more information the sales team is able to collect / gather / learn about each person they'll be interacting with, the better chance they'll have of getting them to say, "yes".