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Comment by bitwrangler | Hacker News Reader

Many people don't realize that Larry started with CIA and they were his first customer. Maybe his endgame is related to his beginning.

https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...

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Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.

For the uninitiated, that's from this video of Bryan Cantrill (from Sun), link goes to the right time: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

Larry "paperclip maximizer" Ellison

Thank you, this made me laugh IRL :D

And running those databases were Sun machines. Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy's famous comment, "You have no privacy; get over it," is all the more ominous in light of this. The fact that corporations now have all the data on us just brings them into parity with the government.

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

So that's who Eric Schmidt (Google/Alphabet CEO/chairman 2001-2017) learned this from. He was at Sun in various high-level leadership positions in 1983-1997.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" - Eric Schmidt (2009)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

> into parity with the government.

lol, as it if were some kind of competition. The reality is the surveillance state knows no real boundaries. The federal intelligence agencies can get whatever they want with little or no friction. Most requests don't even rise to the level of a NSL, which is the "sudo" of "give me all your data on X". In reality there is a range of cooperative behaviors anywhere from a payments system to wholly owned subsidiary to warrant. The government loves the innovation that the private surveillance market has come up with. It's a buffet at this point.

What a non American saying. We should exile this traitor.

The endgame of having total access to peoples' private behavior to manipulate them for profit is not a CIA game. To my knowledge it's not a pattern to do a short stint in intel and then go into business to exploit the information you gathered. No this is different. This is the essence of the threat to democracy and to widespread economic opportunity, since it creates and insurmountable advantage for people with this information. Historically, power sharing doesn't survive when the balance of power is lost between narrow interests and the broader population. That balance is a rarity which is why so many civilizations throughout history settled into broadly 'disincensitivized' populations. If the US loses it, it would lose what makes it special.

Jill Lepore's book "If Then" covers the "why" justifying the early demographic modeling (friends of friends, social networks).

Military types wanted to predict revolutions. Political types wanted to target voters. Marketing types wanted consumers.

https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven...

I don't see a problem with behavioral analytics. Anyone can do it, it's not going to break us. What will is one or two organizations having exclusive access to our behavior and using that info to create a competitive advantage. So I think Apple is moving in that direction more than anyone else. Meta provides demographic info to any advertisers who sign up to use its service and so is not a threat to economic opportunity at all IMO.

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