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UK Discord users were part of a Peter Thiel-linked data collection experiment
- ronsor 9mo agoLet's be fair: almost everything is linked to Peter Thiel's dark magic company these days. The UK's NHS is already quite close with Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/uk/ https://www.palantir.com/uk/
- SilverElfin 9mo agoAnd he was in the Epstein files, allegedly meeting with Russian officials repeatedly at Epstein’s place. One of which is a handler for assets of their intelligence service.
- stuaxo 9mo agoWe should not be doing business with people mentioned that many times in the files.
- tt24 9mo ago[flagged]
- eunoia 9mo agoWhat crime was he convicted of? Surely that has some bearing?
- tt24 8mo agoSo which crimes are unforgivable enough to permanently prevent someone from rejoining society? Typically we handle these by assigning life sentences without parole. Was that the case here?
- platevoltage 9mo ago"a crime"
- tt24 8mo agoFeel free to elaborate on which crimes should require us to permanently exile someone from society and which ones shouldn’t. Usually the court handles these with life sentences without parole. Was that the case here?
- yuumei 9mo agoAs are Bedfordshire police: https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/uk-police-working-with-controversial-tech-giant-palantir-on-real-time-surveillance-network/ https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/uk-police-workin...
- crimsoneer 9mo agoHealth service buys software from massive multinational. They also work with Google, Azure and AWS. More news at 11.
- themafia 9mo ago> buys software To do what, exactly? This is public money being spent. Why are you so eager to be ignorant of it? > from massive multinational. Let's be honest: "Health company buys software from US defense monopolist." > They also work with Google, Azure and AWS Yes, and you and I can also buy those products and use them, do you use any of palantirs products in your daily life?
- crimsoneer 9mo agowho is ignorant of anything? Foundry is a pretty decently known product now, plenty of companies and gov departments use it. It's a B2B product but anybody can go spin up a test account or read the docs, none of it is secret?
- themafia 9mo ago> It's a B2B product And how exactly is the NHS making use of it? What problems is it solving for them? What new capabilities do they have now that they've deployed it? > who is ignorant of anything? B2B is as generic of a label as you can get.
- crimsoneer 9mo agoThey have a whole website to answer all these questions, and there's a fair bit on youtube etc? Honestly, I'm not sure why "what if we had a consistently available tech stack and data model" is that far fetched an idea though. https://digital.nhs.uk/services/federated-data-platform https://digital.nhs.uk/services/federated-data-platform
- themafia 9mo ago
- hsuduebc2 9mo agoThe usual suspect.
- vitorgrs 9mo agoBrazilian Serpro (state IT company) also has a deal with Palantir. "The partnership between Serpro (Federal Data Processing Service) and Palantir Technologies is a technological collaboration focused on leveraging large-scale data analysis (Big Data) and the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Brazilian public sector"
- gruez 9mo ago>Discord have belatedly confirmed that they're working with Persona, an identity detection firm backed by a fund directed by Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, as part of Discord's new global age verification system rollout. >As PCGamer note, Persona's lead investors during two recent rounds of venture capital funding were Founders Fund, who valued them at $1.5 billion in 2021. The Founders Fund was co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2020. >Palantir have, among other things, worked extensively with the USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, [...] The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to Palantir or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Thiel, but is there any evidence for this? For instance, is Thiel known for meddling in the affairs of the companies his fund invests in, or pushing them together for collabs like what Musk does (eg. with x/x.ai/spacex)?
- SoftTalker 9mo agoI think it's prudent to assume that these companies are selling your information to anyone with two nickels to rub together, regardless of which tech celebrities they are linked to.
- reactordev 9mo agoThis. The data collection is the product, that’s why it’s free.
- loeber 9mo agoBut it's not free. Persona is hugely expensive.
- onetokeoverthe 9mo ago[dead]
- reactordev 9mo agoIf you want to buy it yourself, it is. Discord is using Persona because it’s backed by Thiel and the “Founders Fund”. They want your data. Discord has investors from multiple venture funds but Tencent is a large contributor. Yes, that Tencent.
- codingbot3000 9mo ago[flagged]
- notenlish 9mo agoThe title should include Palantir too
- ActorNightly 9mo agoI honestly am glad that all of this is happening, because any time a conservative in the future starts complaining about government overreach, the only response to them should be is that "well, this is what you like".
- kode-targz 9mo agoAs if this had anything to do with right and left or conservative and liberal. How are there still people who see the world like that in 2026?
- apercu 9mo agoYou’re not wrong. But in America there is only one party that is thoroughly owned by Russia and that’s the party in charge of the executive branch right now.
- a022311 9mo agoOwned by Russia? How'd you reach that conclusion? Just take a look at the sanctions imposed on them and the US support for Ukraine in the war. Also: it seems you've fallen into the "Russia is our enemy" propaganda trap.
- krige 9mo ago>US support Remind everyone, which party was blocking this support for as long as possible, with a hole lot of media circus and scaremongering?
- ActorNightly 9mo agoFrom the first Trump campaign, to Jared Kushner, to Tulsi Gabbard, to all the things happening with this campaign, its abundantly clear that conservatives are communicating with Russia very much. The question is if it is illegal or not, and generally, considering Superme Court and DOJ are Trumps puppets, it really doesn't matter. Also, I would highly urge you to consider the fact that you are defending pdf files running the government. You really don't want to go down the road of political arguments and out yourself as one.
- soopypoos 9mo ago> I know children aren't responsible for the sins of their parents, but it doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here that Palantir's UK division is headed by Oswald Mosley's grandson. "ad-hominem is ugly and wrong, like you"
- _slih 9mo agofunny how the FAQ disclaimer about Persona already vanished from the site. not a great look when your transparency lasts shorter than the data retention.
- andtheboat 9mo agoand every post about it being quickly deleted. It's afraid.
- Havoc 9mo agoThe addition of the UK experiment note was also ~48hrs and the removal thereof around 24hr. These guys are just making it up as they go. Very comforting approach to personal data... /s
- pstuart 9mo agoLet's pretend that age verification is a valid need -- is there a way using cryptographic approaches to viably allow an end user to prove that they meet the criteria without sharing other data that they don't want third parties to have access to?
- mctt 9mo agoYes, and it is very easy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223051 "Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token" And to save a debate, you can swap the phrase "liquor store" for "store" aka supermarket/grocery store.
- egorfine 9mo agoIf that was a valid need, it would be solved entirely differently. ZK algorithms are a complete and privacy-preserving solution to that problem. I find it impossible to believe that age verification services are rolled out for what they say they are.
- Bender 9mo agoIn my opinion that is just mathematical obfuscation. They will not be able to resist the urge to have a random looking token that through some obscure process can be mapped back to a person. If not at first, it will appear in some update after people stop talking about it. Discord knows what people are talking about.
- skitter 9mo agoI don't understand – what's the point of not collecting mass amounts of personal identity documents and face scans and linking them to online identities?
- reactordev 9mo agoRemember when I said fuck discord and people came to defend them and say “but surely they aren’t keeping the data”… They are not friendly.
- Traster 9mo agoWhat I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.). That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces. What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.
- saubeidl 9mo agoAs a socialist, I would argue those are both inevitable outcomes of capitalism. First market forces incentivize consolidation (which imo killed off the vibrant early internet...), then a few players got really powerful. Once you have that much money and power, and given the inevitable corruptability of politicians, it makes sense to try and use that money to try and manipulate market rules in your favor. The evolution of the internet has been an in-vitro demonstration of capitalism failure modes and as somebody who liked the internet, that's very unfortunate.
- duped 9mo agoThe biggest change imo is that in the aughts, the idea that children should have unfettered access to personal computers, phones, and the internet was unthinkable. Now we have millennial parents seriously arguing their kids should have smartphones in class. But all this deanonymization garbage is downstream of that vibe shift. I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly. It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.
- hannahstrawbrry 9mo agoThe use of "experiment" really irks me. Might be useful internally but running an involuntary experiment that users are forced to participate in to continue using a service they may pay for is straight up hostile- not even to mention the nature of the experiment handling sensitive personal data.
- storus 9mo agoCan somebody tell me what's behind Thiel's obsession with Antichrist?