What motivates extremely talented tech workers to devote their limited working years to making the world a worse place to live in?
Most of the responses I'm seeing here are about money and while that is probably a factor at some level, I like to believe that people need to have a lot of pressure put on them by society for other reasons to give up their personal morals in exchange for money.
"No one is the villain in their own story".
Most of your feelings aren't rational conclusions based on sound analytical reasoning, and if your day-to-day is just making widgets for other widgets, you probably aren't often forced to update them.
If you look at us biologically speaking, we are herding creatures.
That means the majority will go along with what the leaders want.
While the Milgram experiment was skewed, the reality is most people will shock you to death just because an authority told them so. And if you ask them at the end if what they did was right, they will say yes, or they wouldn't have done it.
Being a decent of German Jews, I normally think: "Who of the people that I know wouldn't turn me in."
The sad reality: very few. It's by design. Herds don't work when everyone is trying to go their own way. There will always be individuals who eschew herd. Biologically, they generally die, but a few find new environments or start their own new herds. Of course the herd problem then starts over.
Any other company with enough developers and data scientists can do what Palantir does. It's the massive amount of information their software uses that is the concern. But that data is collected by our government, and so we have legal recourse to it, either under current law or by passing new privacy laws.
What can Palantir do to you?
For another, I've personally seen my work get turned from a human safety product in one market into a direct instrument of human oppression in another market. Lots of tech is just a tool, which can be used for good or evil. The thing is, once good people see what is possible, it provides them an easy route to doing evil which they might not have had before.
Typewriters can be turned to evil. IBM showed this to the world with their WWII-era Nazi collaboration. That doesn't mean the world should abandon typewriters, or that no self-respecting engineer should work on typewriters, or that they would be necessarily used for evil by the law-enforcement arm of a democratic society.
Should police agencies collect and store real-time location data for every private car? Probably not. I'd support legislation to restrict such practices. Should Palantir help police officers sort and present the data they collect, in general including not only LPR data but also criminal records, known associates, and vehicle information? I'd say yes.
IBM's relationship with the Third Reich was not based on the mere supply of typewriters; such a suggestion reduces your credibility on this topic to zero.
"Punchcards can be turned to evil."
The specific type of dual-use technology is irrelevant to my point.
It’s not like the people against mass surveillance all want their kids to live in unsafe neighborhoods, or be blind to terrorist plots. But everything must be balanced within our set of liberties — and the American way of due process, etc, is purposefully skewed to protect individual rights and liberties.
This is why gun rights is such a hot button issue — some would like to see stricter regulations, because they feel unsafe sending their kids to school in a world of mass shootings. Others feel those restrictions place an undue burden on individual liberties afforded by the constitution.
When it comes to law enforcement, there is a lot of abuse of Power present in the system, which disproportionately affects people of color. Thus, there’s a very valid argument to be made that some of this tech is too dangerous in the hands of law enforcement, despite how much people of all political stripes want their families to be safe.
My aim here is to illuminate the differences in the arguments. I’m not trying to force my (admittedly liberal) point of view on the conversation, because HN isn’t really for politics. My goal here is to show how, despite politics, people can all desire safety for their family, and personal liberties, but have honest disagreements about the best way to achieve that.
1) these efforts do not guarantee their safety and comfort (though others might, these don't) and
2) that even if they did, the ethical price of hunting down undocumented immigrants is inexcusably high. That in the same way that you wouldn't behead someone for speeding, you shouldn't separate families and cause people to live in the shadows simply for having the privilege of cleaning your hotel sheets.
I'm sure internal communication about the product is extremely positive, with phrases like "improved law enforcement accuracy by XX%, decreased customer costs and time by YY," so some may truly believe they are doing something that everyone would agree is good.
I have my answer, but I don't think it's nearly this black and white. Palantir probably does a lot of good, just like all the big tech companies, even though it's the bad stuff that mostly makes the news.
Yes, I'd rather not aid law enforcement in spreading disinformation and targeting journalists, for example [1].
Though I do agree that it's not as cut and dry as "Palantir is evil".
[1] https://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Data-intelligence-fir...
This. A difference between a rock in a sling and a nuclear bomb can, hyperbolically, viewed as a better UI for rather similar goal.
Does it explain the things? Do you see how quantitative differences become qualitative?
If Obama's daughters (or Trump's if you are on the other side) were killed in some horrific racist incident, wouldn't you approve the usage of such software if it was the only hope of getting the perpetrator? Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy".
Yes, I would take that stance every time, and twice on Sunday.
https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs/status/1086757478312960002
What safeguards do you have in place to make sure that personally identifiable information of customers that companies using your tech have is not aggregated and pulled together for nefarious use? For example very targeted lead sourcing or targeted advertisement?
Oh, none, you actually advertise that you are mining all the databases for:
> Prospect and identify leads
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
The differences between us and Palantir then:
1. We don't pitch our software to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, etc., or encourage it's use for these kinds of ends. But we can't specifically block those uses, or we'd be in violation of the OSD.
2. We've been very public with our unwillingness to embrace working with intelligence agencies and the like. See, for example: https://www.wraltechwire.com/2014/04/30/why-a-triangle-tech-...
3. Everything we do is Open Source, meaning that at least the public can take a look inside and see what's going on... modulo any changes a given end user organization makes and keeps private.
4. Our technology is positioned primarily for internal knowledge management / collaboration use inside organizations. But, again, we have no means, legal or technical, to stop somebody from using it for other purposes. And even if we did, they could just download Lucene, ManifoldCF, blah, blah, etc., and build up their own Nefarious Indexing System.
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
There is nothing in this regard that we "don't see". Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, even a worker mining sand somewhere, to use to fabricate silicon chips, which can be used to power computers, which can be used to run privacy violating software, is "guilty". I don't think I need to point out the absurdity of that position. Furthermore, if we really just cared about "get all the money at any cost" we would have immediately jumped at a chance to talk to In-Q-Tel and the possibility of juicy, rich contracts supplying the CIA and their brethren with technology.
Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing, you obviously don't see anything wrong with mining and linking databases of PII information, as long as it's done by "the good guys".
We don't. The line you quoted above is from my LinkedIn profile where it's describing my responsibilities as founder of the company. So, of course, part of what I do is prospecting and identifying leads. All companies do that, I don't think anything we do falls into the "nefarious" range. We aren't using retargeting or buying user information from data mining companies, etc. Our prospecting basically starts and stops with Twitter and LinkedIn... Not exactly spook stuff.
And while I can respect that some people take things to such extremes that they can even find mundane things like advertising unethical; I'm pretty comfortable with my own sense of ethics and our attempt to do the right things. In either case, attempting to draw any parallel between us and Palantir is an exercise in absurdity. Notice that there's no HN top-page stories titled "Fogbeam Lab's Secret User Manual For Cops", etc. :-)
The latter, every time. The nature of principles is that they do not change with changing circumstances. I find your example extremely unpersuasive.
EDIT: I see what you mean. I had mistaken the meaning of OP. Please ignore this comment.