Can you explain the exact way in which this is possible? It’s not legal to be denied jobs based on health. Not to deny insurance
You would not be privy to their internal processes, and thusfar not be able to prove wrong doing. You would just have to hope for a new Snowden and that the found wrongdoings would actually be punished this time.
Also, in some cases: they absolutely do. Try to get hired in Palantir and see how much they know about your browsing history. Anything related to national security or requiring clearances has you investigated.
For instance back when I was interviewing at startups and other companies where I was going to be a strategic hire, I would casually mention how much I enjoyed spending time on my hobbies and with my family on the weekend so companies wouldn’t even extend an offer if they wanted someone “passionate” who would work 60 hours a week and be on call.
But is it really so hard to imagine a world where your individual choice to "opt-out" or work for companies that don't use that info is a massive detriment to your individual life? It doesn't have to be every single company doing it for you to have no _practical_ choice about it (if you want to make market rate for your services.)
But the country and the people who could most benefit from it are more concerned with whatever fake outrage Fox News comes up with an anti woke something or the other.
So yeah, if this is the country America wants, I’m over it. I’ve done my bid.
While other people talk about leaving the country, we are seriously doing research and we are going to spend a month and a half outside of the US this year and I’ve already looked at residency requirements in a couple of countries after retirement including the one we are going to in a month and a half.
I think GP is suggesting that you're supposed to do something akin to what Ben Kenobi did while aboard the Death Star, not what he did beforehand.
This, in no way, represents my own feelings or opinion on this matter. I'm just trying to aid the conversation.
I basically did what they plan on doing. I fcked off because my country was already too far gone. But I always always make sure I will never talk positively or be in denial about the state it’s in. America isn’t there (yet). What made me snarky was the mistaken hypocrisy.
Calibrating your threat model against this attack is unlikely to give you any alpha in 2026. Hiring at tech companies and government is much less deliberate than your mental model supposes.
The current extent of background checks is an API call to Checkr. This is simply to control hiring costs.
As a heuristic, speculated information to build a threat model is unlikely to yield a helpful framework.
How could you possibly know if they use other undisclosed methods as part of the recruitment? You are assuming Palatir would behave ethically. Palantir, the company that will never win awards based on ethics
Notwithstanding the fact that tech companies hire dogshit employees all the time and the vast majority of employees of any company of size 1000+ are average at best, Palantir happens to be rating so high on the scale of evil that I'd pop champagne if it got nuked tomorrow.
If any company would do it, it would be Palantir.
Also, I’m not saying they have the best talent, just that they want the best talent.
It is impossible to prove a negative, but having strongly held beliefs without evidence is an antipattern.
Do you have any proof they don’t have a goose randomly deciding to hire you?
The lack of proof gives no credence to it actually happening
Under this conspiracy theory they'd have to be available for sale somewhere, right? Yet no journalist has ever picked up the story? Nobody has ever come out and whistleblown that their company was buying Google searches and denying applicants for searching for naughty words?
It is well documented in many many places, people just don't care.
Google can claim that it doesn’t sell your data, but if you think that the data about your searches isn't being sold, here is just a small selection of real sources.
https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre...
And it isn't paranoia, consumer surveillance is a very real problem, and one of the few paths to profitability for OpenAI.
https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/data-brokers-and-the-sal...
https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/data_brokers_and_sec...
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/26AmendedCompla...
https://epic.org/a-health-privacy-check-up-how-unfair-modern...
Citation needed for a claim of this magnitude.
> It is well documented in many many places, people just don't care.
Yes, please share documentation of companies buying search data and rejecting candidates for it.
Like most conspiracy theories, there are a lot of statements about this happening and being documented but the documentation never arrives.
https://www.upturn.org/work/comments-to-the-cfpb-on-data-bro...
> Most employers we examined used an ATS capable of integrating with a range of background screening vendors, including those providing social media screens, criminal background checks, credit checks, drug and health screenings, and I-9 and E-Verify.29 As applicants, however, we had no way of knowing which, if any, background check systems were used to evaluate our applications. Employers provided no meaningful feedback or explanation when an offer of work was not extended. Thus, a job candidate subjected to a background check may have no opportunity to contest the data or conclusions derived therefrom.30
If you are going to ignore a decade of research etc... I can't prove it to you.
> The agency found that data brokers routinely sidestep the FCRA by claiming they aren't subject to its requirements – even while selling the very types of sensitive personal and financial information Congress intended the law to protect.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-propo...
> Data brokers obtain information from a variety of sources, including retailers, websites and apps, newspaper and magazine publishers, and financial service providers, as well as cookies and similar technologies that gather information about consumers’ online activities. Other information is publicly available, such as criminal and civil record information maintained by federal, state, and local courts and governments, and information available on the internet, including information posted by consumers on social media.
> Data brokers analyze and package consumers’ information into reports used by creditors, insurers, landlords, employers, and others to make decisions about consumers
https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_fcra-nprm...
And that CFPB proposal was withdrawn:
https://www.consumerfinancialserviceslawmonitor.com/2025/05/...
Note screen shots of paywalled white papers from large HR orgs:
https://directorylogos.mediabrains.com/clientimages/f82ca2e3...
Image from here:
https://vendordirectory.shrm.org/company/839063/whitepapers/...
But I am betting you come back with another ad hominem, so I will stay in the real world while you ignore it, enjoy having the last word.
Every link you provided is for tangential things. They're bad, yes, but they're not google searches. Provide a link where some individual says "Yes, I know what so-and-so searched for last wednesday."
Can you answer this question without walls of unrelated text, ad hominem attacks (saying I’m in a cult), or link bombing links that don’t answer the question?
It’s a simple question. You keep insisting there’s an answer and trying to ad hominem me for not knowing it, but you consistently cannot show it.
Anyone who has worked in hiring for any big company knows how much goes into ensuring hiring processes don't accidentally touch anything that could be construed as illegal discrimination. Employees are trained, policies and procedures are documented, and anyone who even accidentally says or does anything that comes too close to possibly running afoul of hiring laws will find themselves involved with HR.
The idea that these same companies also have a group of people buying private search information or ChatGPT conversations for individual applicants from somewhere (which nobody can link to) and then secretly making hiring decisions based on what they find is silly.
The arguments come with the usual array of conspiracy theory defenses, like the "How can you prove it's not happening" or the claims that it's well documented that it's happening but nobody can link to that documentation.
For instance, if your job is to be on your feet all day and you can barely stand, then that job is not for you. I have never met employers that are so flush in opportunities of candidates that they just randomly choose to exclude certain people.
And if it's insurance, there's a group rate. The difference only variable is what the employee chooses out of your selected plans (why make a plan available if you don't want people to pick that one?) and family size. It's illegal to discriminate of family size and that does add up to 10k extra on the employer side. But there are downsides to hiring young single people, so things may balance out.
If we circumvent those privacy laws, through user licenses, or new technology - we are removing the protections of normal citizens. Therefore, the bad behavior which we already decided as a society to ban can now be perpetrated again, with perhaps a fresh new word for it to dodge said old laws.
If I understand your comment, you are essentially wondering why those old laws existed in the first place. I would suggest racism or other systemic issues, and differences in insurance premiums, are more than enough to justify the existence of privacy laws. Take a normal office job as an example over a manual labor intensive job. No reason at all that health conditions should impact that. The idea of not being hired because I have a young child, or a health condition, that would raise the group rate from the insurer passing the cost to my employer (which would be in their best interest to do) is a terrible thought. And it happened before, and we banned that practice (or did our best to do so).
All this to say, I believe HIPAA helps people, and if ChatGPT is being used to partially or fully facilitate medical decision making, they should be bound under strict laws preventing the release of that data regardless of their existing user agreements.
It’s not just medical but a broad carve out called “bona fide occupational qualifications”. If there’s a good reason for it, hiring antidiscrimination laws allow exceptions.
So less, the job requires you to stand all day, and more, once a week or so they ask you make a binder of materials, and the hole puncher they want you to use dislocates your hands (true story). Or, it's a desk job, but you can't get from your desk to the bathroom in your wheelchair unless they widen the aisles between desks (hypothetical).
Read your policy!
Insurers derive rates for each employer from each employer's costs where laws allow this. And many employers self fund medical insurance.
GDPR Request. Ah wait, regulation bad.
The continued secrecy of the conspiracy would then depend on every person involved in orchestrating this privacy violation and illegal hiring scheme keeping it secret forever. Nobody ever leaking it to the press, no disgruntled employees e-mailing their congress people, no concerned citizens slipping a screenshot to journalists. Both during and after their employment with the company.
To even make this profitable at all, the data would have to be secretly sold to a lot of companies for this use, and also continuously updated to be relevant. Giant databases of your secret ChatGPT queries being sold continuously in volume, with all employees at both the sellers, the buyers, and the users of this information all keeping it perfectly quiet, never leaking anything.
There is a vast gap between what is not legal and what is actually actionable in a court of law, which is well known to a large power nexus.
The US has been pretty much a free-for-all for surveillance and abusing all sorts of information, even when illegal to do so. On the rare occasions that they get caught, the penalty is almost always a handslap, and they know it.
You just get an automated denial from the ATS that's based on the output from AI inference engine.
What are the chances those bills last long in the current administration and supreme court?