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This is scary stuff! I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now.

This is scary stuff! I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is getting some.

ihsw 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of incestuous guild of business partners/software developers that flow between each organization (eg: ex-gov employees working for Palantir/Facebook/etc, vice versa).
- samstave 13y ago
  FB is riddled with .gov/,mil employees. Their head of security went from NSA to FB to NSA. They are unscrupulous.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  {x: has_security_clearance(x) = true}
psbp 13y ago
"I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now." Just now?
nir 13y ago
Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- boi_v2 13y ago
  In FB you use your wall to publish the info you want to share openly, the other important stuff like private chats, online behavior (clicked links, friends you visit, photos you see, time of login/logout), groups you participate, GPS locations of places you've been or are and etc are not supposed to be open to anyone.
  - nir 13y ago
    Yes, but experience shows it's FB's interest that you share as much of your data as possible. It's not going to change, publicizing your data is its whole business.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I don't consider it a secret who my friends are, not even most of my conversations. But there is a difference between that, and the industrialized scooping up of it, the storing and correlating it forever... me, today, is not what worries me; Dr. Strangelove is. Imagine spooks following you all day, each day, and every time after you talked with someone, they walk up to them and ask what the conversation was about. Imagine dozens of spooks per individual, each of them constantly taking notes on paper that does not perish. This is the society we live in, the society that we built while sleepwalking. Even the spooks aren't aware of what they're doing, not really.
smacktoward 13y ago
Come to DC sometime and take the subway to the Pentagon stop. Frequently the entire station is plastered top to bottom with giant Palantir banners advertising all the ways they can help Lt. Col. Mid-Level Functionary (who's the person who would be seeing these ads -- his boss has a driver) keep tabs on people. I wouldn't be amazed that they do business with the national-security complex; I'd be amazed if it wasn't by far their #1 customer.
danielrhodes 13y ago
Peter Theil is the founder of Palantir. He also happens to be the original investor in Facebook. I think that's where the connection between the two companies stops. If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts. These Daily Kos articles play it pretty loose with how they connect the dots together and make it out to be some large conspiracy.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  >revenue comes from advertising considering the potential of internet advertizing schemas to be used as orders of magnitude larger, easy transcending national borders, v2.0 of "pizza parlor" for things like money laundering, untraceable payments, etc...
- mrschwabe 13y ago
  If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts. Given that programs like PRISM are done in secret, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily assume Facebook's public financial returns are sharing the whole story. Ie- money may be changing hands behind closed doors. This, aside from the blatant invasion of privacy, should be our biggest concern about the recent NSA revaluations. As participants in a free-market economy it's important we know who is cheating. Ie- those who subvert the free-market via secret gov/intel/military deals.
  - martinlandau 13y ago
    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-the-experiential-jaron-lanier-explains-virtual-reality.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-th... Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.

ihsw 13y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of incestuous guild of business partners/software developers that flow between each organization (eg: ex-gov employees working for Palantir/Facebook/etc, vice versa).

samstave 13y ago
FB is riddled with .gov/,mil employees. Their head of security went from NSA to FB to NSA. They are unscrupulous.
VladRussian2 13y ago
{x: has_security_clearance(x) = true}

psbp 13y ago

"I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now." Just now?

nir 13y ago

Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
boi_v2 13y ago
In FB you use your wall to publish the info you want to share openly, the other important stuff like private chats, online behavior (clicked links, friends you visit, photos you see, time of login/logout), groups you participate, GPS locations of places you've been or are and etc are not supposed to be open to anyone.
- nir 13y ago
  Yes, but experience shows it's FB's interest that you share as much of your data as possible. It's not going to change, publicizing your data is its whole business.
PavlovsCat 13y ago
I don't consider it a secret who my friends are, not even most of my conversations. But there is a difference between that, and the industrialized scooping up of it, the storing and correlating it forever... me, today, is not what worries me; Dr. Strangelove is. Imagine spooks following you all day, each day, and every time after you talked with someone, they walk up to them and ask what the conversation was about. Imagine dozens of spooks per individual, each of them constantly taking notes on paper that does not perish. This is the society we live in, the society that we built while sleepwalking. Even the spooks aren't aware of what they're doing, not really.

smacktoward 13y ago

Come to DC sometime and take the subway to the Pentagon stop. Frequently the entire station is plastered top to bottom with giant Palantir banners advertising all the ways they can help Lt. Col. Mid-Level Functionary (who's the person who would be seeing these ads -- his boss has a driver) keep tabs on people. I wouldn't be amazed that they do business with the national-security complex; I'd be amazed if it wasn't by far their #1 customer.

danielrhodes 13y ago

Peter Theil is the founder of Palantir. He also happens to be the original investor in Facebook. I think that's where the connection between the two companies stops. If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts. These Daily Kos articles play it pretty loose with how they connect the dots together and make it out to be some large conspiracy.

VladRussian2 13y ago
>revenue comes from advertising considering the potential of internet advertizing schemas to be used as orders of magnitude larger, easy transcending national borders, v2.0 of "pizza parlor" for things like money laundering, untraceable payments, etc...
mrschwabe 13y ago
If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts. Given that programs like PRISM are done in secret, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily assume Facebook's public financial returns are sharing the whole story. Ie- money may be changing hands behind closed doors. This, aside from the blatant invasion of privacy, should be our biggest concern about the recent NSA revaluations. As participants in a free-market economy it's important we know who is cheating. Ie- those who subvert the free-market via secret gov/intel/military deals.
- martinlandau 13y ago
  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-the-experiential-jaron-lanier-explains-virtual-reality.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-th... Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.