7 ms·

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that the

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just because someone realized "hey, I bet we can sell this data" We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.

londons_explore 9mo ago
> Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because ... ... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.
- arscan 9mo ago
  Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.
- i80and 9mo ago
  I really haven't found this to be true at all; corporations are just as dysfunctional or worse. It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.
  - phatfish 9mo ago
    The dysfunction on the corporate side just gets swept under the rug, only in extreme cases does it get brought to the attention of the public. Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring. It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects. Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.
- baq 9mo ago
  Corporations are not disallowed to have a single master database. Government databases are at least in some cases firewalled off each other by law.
- windexh8er 9mo ago
  The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.
  - mc32 9mo ago
    One big difference is that public companies restructure when things aren’t looking rosy. Government organizations don’t often reorganize and structurally they don’t have much flexibility.
    - CPLX 9mo ago
      The government restructures endlessly what are you talking about. DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019. Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.
      - mc32 9mo ago
        What I'm talking about is orgs like the CDC, FCC, DMV, IRS, etc. They grow more than they re-org and cut the workforce, moreover, they seldom redefine positions to take on more responsibility at the staff level. Obviously they don't have the same outsourcing threat due to some limitations --which is good, but it's also true that public companies can outsource more readily. Goverment workers rarely get fired for under-performance outside of budget-induced cuts.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
- rwmj 9mo ago
  I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.
- QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
  A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.
  - sgarland 9mo ago
    If the market was critically examining fundamentals and thinking beyond the next quarter, I might agree with you. As it is, by and large it cares about the next earnings report. I work in fintech, at a market leader. We are wildly inefficient, but there is little interest in fixing it, because we’re making money hand over fist.
  - TFYS 9mo ago
    > A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain. We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.
- buellerbueller 9mo ago
  The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction. The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
mothballed 9mo ago
The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims, with that surveillance fed to Palentir. Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.
- pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    Maybe the feds violated some fine print here? I'm sure FBI will investigate. /s The Federal Bureau of Instigation
  - ipaddr 9mo ago
    A concentration camp is a place where large amounts of Jews were killed. Using it to describe deportation where people aren't killed is offensive to some and full of fake drama to others.
    - kelipso 9mo ago
      “A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.” Do we know what is happening to these people? What their conditions are? Why do we not hear from them afterwards?
      - sawjet 9mo ago
        We do hear from them. Why are you worrying that we don't(without evidence)?
        filoeleven 9mo ago
rudhdb773b 9mo ago
I don't really mind private surveillance. It's when the data gets sold or otherwise obtained by state powers that it gets scary.
- torben-friis 9mo ago
  Why would non state actors be any less scary? Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
  - rudhdb773b 9mo ago
    > Why would non state actors be any less scary? Non-state actors can't easily use violence to throw me in jail.
    - andruby 9mo ago
      Blackwater, Wagner, Aegis, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, etc enter chat..
      - pc86 9mo ago
        I wasn't aware Blackwater operates jails.
    - sgarland 9mo ago
      They seem to be able to induce whistleblowers to off themselves at a shocking rate, though.
    - mmcwilliams 9mo ago
      You're under the belief that private actors can't influence state actors to use violence on their behalf, completely isolating them from responsibility? If a private business calls the police on a suspected trespasser and the police shoot that person, is the business held liable? Ever? Seems like they have the better end of the bargain than the state.
danesparza 9mo ago
And then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it" These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms. This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it. So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
- kurthr 9mo ago
  Yes, retroactively manufactured cause for a warrant to find only the information you want. Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it. It has happened before and it will happen again.
  - carefulfungi 9mo ago
    They've stopped obtaining warrants. ICE claims they can enter homes forcefully without a judge-signed warrant. Judges have released at least one victim seized this way.
    - gortok 9mo ago
      Can you provide a news link to this? As I understand it, courts have historically followed the precedent that “you can’t suppress the body”, meaning even if the method of an arrest is illegal, you don’t have to let the person go if their arrest is otherwise valid.
api 9mo ago
Starting way back in the early 2000s I was predicting all this and was consistently called nuts and paranoid. In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative. The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care. We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast." This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > I was predicting all this You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address. > This is a devil's bargain Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?
  - api 9mo ago
    I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy. Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight. When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse. The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.
elric 9mo ago
> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough. I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way. Until it did.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?
  - sbarre 9mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
    - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
      Sure. I’m calling out data-retention discussions as entirely orthogonal to HHS data being used for immigration enforcement. There isn’t a data-retention issue with HHS having home records, there is an abuse issue with DHS giving it to Palantir to VLOOKUP addresses out of.
    - elric 9mo ago
      It certainly wasn't intended as a straw man argument. I was speaking to the broader issue that any data that's gathered anywhere can be used against people. Even if it seems like there are good reasons to store it. I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it: > We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
- ahzhzvH 9mo ago
  > Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_speech/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe... I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.
imchillyb 9mo ago
Cambridge Analytica was the blueprint, unfortunately, and not a deterrent. Much like movies ands television shows attempted to warn viewers of the dangers of robotic and automated militaries. The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control. Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.
naravara 9mo ago
The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.
pavlov 9mo ago
The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
- rob74 9mo ago
  ...plus Trump is now threatening the EU with tarrifs unless they water down their data protection rules.
  - pavlov 9mo ago
    These days having the American president threaten you with random tariffs is the clearest indicator you’re doing something right.
buellerbueller 9mo ago
Snowden should have been the warning shot.

londons_explore 9mo ago

> Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because ... ... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.

arscan 9mo ago
Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.
i80and 9mo ago
I really haven't found this to be true at all; corporations are just as dysfunctional or worse. It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.
- phatfish 9mo ago
  The dysfunction on the corporate side just gets swept under the rug, only in extreme cases does it get brought to the attention of the public. Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring. It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects. Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.
baq 9mo ago
Corporations are not disallowed to have a single master database. Government databases are at least in some cases firewalled off each other by law.
windexh8er 9mo ago
The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.
- mc32 9mo ago
  One big difference is that public companies restructure when things aren’t looking rosy. Government organizations don’t often reorganize and structurally they don’t have much flexibility.
  - CPLX 9mo ago
    The government restructures endlessly what are you talking about. DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019. Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.
    - mc32 9mo ago
      What I'm talking about is orgs like the CDC, FCC, DMV, IRS, etc. They grow more than they re-org and cut the workforce, moreover, they seldom redefine positions to take on more responsibility at the staff level. Obviously they don't have the same outsourcing threat due to some limitations --which is good, but it's also true that public companies can outsource more readily. Goverment workers rarely get fired for under-performance outside of budget-induced cuts.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
rwmj 9mo ago
I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.
QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.
- sgarland 9mo ago
  If the market was critically examining fundamentals and thinking beyond the next quarter, I might agree with you. As it is, by and large it cares about the next earnings report. I work in fintech, at a market leader. We are wildly inefficient, but there is little interest in fixing it, because we’re making money hand over fist.
- TFYS 9mo ago
  > A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain. We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.
buellerbueller 9mo ago
The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction. The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.

mothballed 9mo ago

The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims, with that surveillance fed to Palentir. Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.

pbhjpbhj 9mo ago
[flagged]
- actionfromafar 9mo ago
  Maybe the feds violated some fine print here? I'm sure FBI will investigate. /s The Federal Bureau of Instigation
- ipaddr 9mo ago
  A concentration camp is a place where large amounts of Jews were killed. Using it to describe deportation where people aren't killed is offensive to some and full of fake drama to others.
  - kelipso 9mo ago
    “A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.” Do we know what is happening to these people? What their conditions are? Why do we not hear from them afterwards?
    - sawjet 9mo ago
      We do hear from them. Why are you worrying that we don't(without evidence)?
      - filoeleven 9mo ago

rudhdb773b 9mo ago

I don't really mind private surveillance. It's when the data gets sold or otherwise obtained by state powers that it gets scary.

torben-friis 9mo ago
Why would non state actors be any less scary? Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
- rudhdb773b 9mo ago
  > Why would non state actors be any less scary? Non-state actors can't easily use violence to throw me in jail.
  - andruby 9mo ago
    Blackwater, Wagner, Aegis, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, etc enter chat..
    - pc86 9mo ago
      I wasn't aware Blackwater operates jails.
  - sgarland 9mo ago
    They seem to be able to induce whistleblowers to off themselves at a shocking rate, though.
  - mmcwilliams 9mo ago
    You're under the belief that private actors can't influence state actors to use violence on their behalf, completely isolating them from responsibility? If a private business calls the police on a suspected trespasser and the police shoot that person, is the business held liable? Ever? Seems like they have the better end of the bargain than the state.

danesparza 9mo ago

And then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it" These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms. This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it. So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
kurthr 9mo ago
Yes, retroactively manufactured cause for a warrant to find only the information you want. Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it. It has happened before and it will happen again.
- carefulfungi 9mo ago
  They've stopped obtaining warrants. ICE claims they can enter homes forcefully without a judge-signed warrant. Judges have released at least one victim seized this way.
  - gortok 9mo ago
    Can you provide a news link to this? As I understand it, courts have historically followed the precedent that “you can’t suppress the body”, meaning even if the method of an arrest is illegal, you don’t have to let the person go if their arrest is otherwise valid.

api 9mo ago

Starting way back in the early 2000s I was predicting all this and was consistently called nuts and paranoid. In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative. The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care. We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast." This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> I was predicting all this You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address. > This is a devil's bargain Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?
- api 9mo ago
  I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy. Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight. When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse. The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.

elric 9mo ago

> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough. I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way. Until it did.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?
- sbarre 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    Sure. I’m calling out data-retention discussions as entirely orthogonal to HHS data being used for immigration enforcement. There isn’t a data-retention issue with HHS having home records, there is an abuse issue with DHS giving it to Palantir to VLOOKUP addresses out of.
  - elric 9mo ago
    It certainly wasn't intended as a straw man argument. I was speaking to the broader issue that any data that's gathered anywhere can be used against people. Even if it seems like there are good reasons to store it. I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it: > We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
ahzhzvH 9mo ago
> Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_speech/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe... I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.

imchillyb 9mo ago

Cambridge Analytica was the blueprint, unfortunately, and not a deterrent. Much like movies ands television shows attempted to warn viewers of the dangers of robotic and automated militaries. The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control. Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.

naravara 9mo ago

The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.

pavlov 9mo ago

The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.

rob74 9mo ago
...plus Trump is now threatening the EU with tarrifs unless they water down their data protection rules.
- pavlov 9mo ago
  These days having the American president threaten you with random tariffs is the clearest indicator you’re doing something right.

buellerbueller 9mo ago

Snowden should have been the warning shot.