Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

Oh, how high-minded and ethical of them, to turn down "opportunities to .. collect or mine data" like the rest of Silicon Valley does. Give me a break.

It's one thing for consumer internet companies to show me an ad for mattresses because they know I searched for mattresses. It's wholly another to help government entities aggregate license plate data, run "predictive policing" programs, run the Pentagon's spy drone program, and help ICE track immigrants, as Palantir does. Frankly if given the choice I'll take the mattress ads.

View on HN

I think the difference is that all those programs are run by the government using data the government owns. The LAPD is going to scan license plates and analyze the data whether Palantir helps them or not. Palantir does not by itself collect or mine data, which could be better or worse depending on how much you trust your government.

>The LAPD is going to scan license plates and analyze the data whether Palantir helps them or not

this isn't true actually. the police uses services like Palantir as a sort of get around because lots of data collection literally requires a warrant[1]

The US suffers from a schizophrenic legal situation where it has (for good reasons) barred its government from spying on its citizens, but has somehow outsourced it to private entities, the one level of indirection apparently makes that okay.

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/cbp-does-end-run...

> the one level of indirection apparently makes that okay

This is a pattern I've seen from America in general, loopholes against the spirit of the law, healthcare through 3rd parties, it seems there is always somewhere to kick the buck down for liability purposes. There is always a quest to find a technicality for a way out of some rules, the spirit of the rules don't seem to matter much.

"Somebody will do something you deem immoral whether you participate or note" is not a strong argument for why you should actually participate.

It's clear that the authors of the US Constitution believed that it should be difficult for the government to perform certain enforcement actions. The last 200+ years of jurisprudence and legislation back this up. The police need a warrant in order to search a home. The prosecution needs a court order to compel testimony.

I don't have a problem with saying "the LAPD is going to enforce traffic laws whether or not Palantir assists them". But my response would be "yes, and we should think very carefully about how easy we make it for 'enforce traffic law' to look like 'mass surveillance'". Legislation and jurisprudence move a lot slower than we'd like and I think it's good that individuals and companies think about how they choose to participate in these systems and if they're over-enabling government enforcement and surveillance while we wait for politicians and judges to play catch-up.

not sure if that's what their saying. my interpretation is they're not going to sell that data or the result of their analysis for advertising purposes.

they'll collect or mine whatever they can get their hands, i'm certain of that. it's a data company.

No they won't, unless they are flat out lying. They can lie, but considering they have many customers all over the world, mostly big companies with big legal departments, it may not be the best for their business.

Palantir produces data analysis tools, this is basically Excel but for bigger data sets. Microsoft doesn't get what you put into your Excel sheets (not really sure now...) and neither does Palantir with their platform.

They probably have some sort of telemetry to monitor how their tools are used, to "improve user experience", like most large software vendors. But it is not related to the data being processed.

This is right. Palantir is a suite of tools or platform that a company uses to analyze their own data.

Palantir develops many of the tools which implies they’ve run them themselves also. For example, they have tools for scraping social media platforms to build profiles of people. You don’t build those tools without running them along the way. They just make their clients run them most of the time for liability reasons (it’s a lot harder to prosecute the CIA for spying)

They brag repeatedly about their “data collection” methods although of course details are hard to find. I’m not convinced they just make the tool and have no access to the data.

What do you have to convince you otherwise?

They’re a famously shadowy secretive spying company and nowhere do I see a terms of service that says they don’t collect data on me. They’ve previously discussed their tools for spying on Facebook and other “public” sites and it seems clear they must have run them at some point. They come in and modify their software to work especially for a customers needs.

Are you familiar with Project Maven? They gather drone data and have humans label it so they can plan drone strikes and other intelligence efforts.

Palantir builds tools for other government agencies to analyze their own data. Palantir the company doesn't see the data that Palantir the tool (Gotham or Foundry) is used to analyze.

Why do you still believe the bullshit corporate PR? Snowden, Manning, Assange... Crypto AG, Cambridge Analytica, etc. How many times does it need to happen for us to see it?

The only real solution I've found is to help build the fully agent-centric web, where there are no third parties - full P2P Protocol Cooperativism. [1] [2]

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

[2] http://developer.holochain.org

Because I worked at Palantir. Can you point to sources specifically claiming that Palantir itself, not the organizations using Palantir, are accessing people's data? Because if so, this is news both to me and to a lot of other former and current Palantir employees.

Palantir the company doesn't have access to the data. The government agencies have access to the data. Palantir licenses its software to these organizations. The company doesn't have special access to any sensitive data.

> Because I worked at Palantir

Well that's a good reason.

The point I'm making is that I don't agree on Palantir's approach and strategy. If you watch the Ava Duvernay's documentary '13th' you'll see that systemic oppression of black bodies never ended. The school-to-prison pipeline guarantees exploitation and incarceration of the US's dark history of slavery and genocide.

So instead of Palantir pushing for systemic change, I see their technology as regressive and focused on giving power to unjust causes.

If you want to read more about how algorithms recreate bias, there's quite a lot of material that has come out recently. Here is an important point from Algorithsm of Oppression:

※ Those who have the power to design systems--classification or technical [like library, museum, & information professionals]--hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.[1]

There's also another book called Automating Inequality, among others.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2206336831?book_show_a...

> Are you familiar with Project Maven?

There seems to me to be a strong neoliberal/libertarian population on Hacker News who believes, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, that 'there is no alternative'. They have completely soaked up Silicon Valley's Imperialist 'Manifest Destiny' mission.

They can't see their own privileged position and power. They attribute their own success to their personal efforts, instead of seeing how various social institutions (including knowledge and access to a rich scientific inheritance) built them up.

So when we pose them a question about Project Maven, they want to identify the one 'bad apple' [1] instead of facing the fact that systemically something is rotten, and that we might have to evolve the underlying architectures. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0&feature=youtu.be

[2] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

I find their argument somewhat disingenuous, as they are paid for that mining directly by governments (they famously created the MVP with the express intent of selling it to the US), and therefore have never needed to consider advertising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com