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How are Palantir so effective (as this article is alluding)? From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I t
by tomaytotomato 9mo ago
How are Palantir so effective (as this article is alluding)?
From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I think inefficiency, data siloing, politics and lack of communication between departments and also internally not communicating between teams. Not withstanding a lack of cooperating and willingness to change.
Did Palantir have a political mandate, or can they just cut through the bureaucracy or bypass it with technology?
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> How are Palantir so effective? What are you using to conclude their effectiveness? It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP. On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget. [1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/ https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
- xrd 9mo agoWhoa, that's the story! I don't see that referenced in the 404media story, do you have a link/summary for that?
- JumpCrisscross 9mo agoAdded.
- RobertoG 9mo agowho say they are effective? They just have contacts. It's the privatization of what started as an intelligence program. Recommended watching (The REAL Story Behind Palantir's Dystopian Pre-Crime Takeover (w/ Whitney Webb)): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3DFZFoJC5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3DFZFoJC5s
- SilverBirch 9mo agoAre they effective? Do you have data on the number of people they've correctly identified vs false-positives. In fact, do you have any evidence they're even trying to limit false positives? The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
- ClarityJones 9mo agoIf I understand correctly, you're saying that in a majority of cases (or something approaching that) the targets of these raids are not subject to lawful deportation? I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
- SilverBirch 9mo agoI'm saying we have absolutely no concrete statistical data, and in the press we have many cases where law enforcement has been deliberately negligent in order to deport people who were here legally. We can actually see them deliberately trying to avoid doing the things you would do if you wanted to establish the people you were trying to deport were here illegally. So it's fair to say, until we have some evidence that these people were here illegally the sensible thing to do is to assume they are innocent. It's also kind of a problem to say "Oh well, we've got no concrete data, let's continue to let them deport whoever they like and shoot anyone who gets in the way".
- blablabla123 9mo agoFrom what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway? Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
- lrvick 9mo agoThey almost exclusively hire fresh grads who need money more than ethics, and it shows in everything they do.
- tucnak 9mo agoExactly like any other big tech (Google, Microsoft, etc) or consulting (McKinsey, Deloitte, etc) company! There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Government departments, military. They are happy to take credit for all the "conniving" allegations because it makes them look like they have a plan, and anybody with purchasing power involving with them knows it corresponds very little to the company operationally, i.e. what the company does.
- boelboel 9mo agoIt's interesting to see how their CEO plays into the whole thing, trying to look paranoid/crazy/brutal/.... It's really just branding/marketing. It's similar to how certain politicians in the US present themselves through vice signalling. Doesn't matter what goes on in the background, the unwashed masses will think things must be happening.
- lrvick 9mo agoWell yes, all the big tech companies are just as corrupt as Palintir, but only Palintir is actively making tech purpose built to enable some of the most vile people on the planet to more easily physically kidnap and harm human beings for money. They are trying to be 1930s IBM
- ako 9mo agoPalantir's mission is to exactly solve the problem you're describing: break through data siloes to get better information. Core of the platform are data pipelines that can move data from any silo into the palantir data lake, where it can be analysed. Their forward engineering project approach probably enables them to bypass the organisational boundaries between departments. Their top-down selling approach ensures management assists bypassing organisational boundaries.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> break through data siloes to get better information This is the pitch of every consulting company ever. In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.
- moolcool 9mo agoSomething I see often in technical circles (and I'm not accusing you) is the manufacturing of consent for ghoulish behaviour by describing it in a reductive way. I think there's a bias to consider sophisticated violations of civil rights as more nefarious than mundane ones.
- wavefunction 9mo ago"structured data transfers" yeah I've done those, difference is it wasn't to build fascDB or extract public monies at grossly over-inflated rates
- NVHacker 9mo agoYou do know that Palantir is now in the UK and getting access to data through the same "health" channels, don't you ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56590249 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56590249
- tomaytotomato 9mo agoUK government departments are slow and hostile to change, so I am skeptical that Palantir being parachuted in, would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it.
- mmcwilliams 9mo agoPalantir holds over £1B in contracts with the UK government, some of them of an undisclosed nature. Must be some impressive CSV.
- _joel 9mo agoThey've been in there for some time. Just ask Wes Streeting.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it The U.S. government almost certainly has intimate health data on every Briton as a result of these deals.
- javierpresnsr 9mo agoIt is easy to be "effective" when you get paid to circumvent any check and balances