Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals | Hacker News Reader

Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals

theintercept.com

322 pointscdrnsf122 comments

It seems like the sole purpose of palantir is to give data to the government they wouldnt have access to without a warrant. So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled??? The difference between now and a few years ago seems to be that companies are assisting law enforcement with even more advanced datacollection.

> So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled???

It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.

correct

PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.

The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight

I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site

How is it guaranteed to be the same accuracy of data that is not retrieved through a warrant ?

It just needs to be accurate-enough to eventually get a warrant.

you don't need warrants to query these databases

They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data

You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.

If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it

Right, I understand they don't need a warrant for the databases. I'm saying that they use the databases to get enough data for a warrant that they wouldn't be able to get without the databases.

Parallel construction. They get enough data, legal or not, to know who to look for. Then they surveil you until you slip.

Your bank and mobile data carrier and cable company already did for you, on your behalf. It’s all searchable via your phone number, which you have to provide to all the apps you DO sign up for, so they can easily query your name, photo, address, purchase history, etc.

This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.

There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.

As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".

It’s not just Alito and Thomas who have been hostile to the 4th amendment, disrespect for the 4th amendment has been a bipartisan affair for 50 years.

I don’t see why anyone is downvoting this, it’s trivial to see the history of votes on 4th amendment cases. Terry v Ohio is a great example.

because this isn't simply a matter of the constitution, it involves a massive corporation and both of these men have been caught receiving gifts from wealthy "friends" then openly refusing to cooperate when this information came to light.

We are assuming they are the only 2 doing (and as far as I know, none of the other judges have been implicated) but that's like finding two drunk guys passed out on a bench on a college campus and assuming that binge drinking isn't rampant in college.

You’re claim is totally unrelated to what I’m saying.

> As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen.

Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.

I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.

I don't want to see any more landmark cases from the current supreme court.

I would hope this case wouldn't be hard to make. If the government isn't allowed to censor people through third parties (e.g., threaten onerous investigations of a platform unless a specific person is kicked off), the government shouldn't be allowed to conduct unreasonable searches through a third party. Would we be okay if the FBI contracted with private detective firms to conduct warrantless searches?

But what would be the legal basis for such a decision?

Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)

A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.

This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.

Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.

And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)

> Palantir gives the health data to government

Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it

The problem with today's society is you walk into a hospital bleeding and they make you sign an ultimatum.

Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.

If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.

Fun fact: it’s illegal to open new hospitals without the permission of the government.

There are multiple layers of corruption at work here. (They also cap the number of doctors, and clinics, etc).

> it’s illegal to open new hospitals without the permission of the government.

This doesn't seem surprising on its face given that a hospital is, not unreasonably, a heavily regulated entity.

“on its face” is doing the heavy lifting here. Banking is highly regulated but you don’t need government permission to open new branches. The food supply chain is heavily regulated but you don’t need government permission to start new restaurants.

The supply of medical care, from operating rooms to doctors themselves, is heavily controlled by the state. There are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that would flow into reducing the cost and increasing the availability of high quality medical care in the US if this were not so.

The demand is through the roof and will continue to rise. But the right to supply is only handed out to cronies.

> Banking is highly regulated but you don’t need government permission to open new branches.

The closer economic unit would probably be a bank itself, and to my understanding you do effectively need the government’s permission to open one of those.

> don’t need government permission to start new restaurants

Zoning, construction permits, occupancy permits, patio permits, food licenses, liquor licenses, health inspections, dumpster permits, etc

All of those are normal things for operating any business, and are not limited in the usual case.

Liquor licenses notwithstanding.

There is no default-deny for getting a business license or opening a restaurant in a commercially zoned area, anyone can do it. Licensing and permission aren’t quite the same thing.

in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.

If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.

The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.

>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.

>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that

> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"

> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals

> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)

I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.

The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.

Oh I fully realize that the original hospitals were ... let's say better than the gutter by about 10%, and no more than that. Both for the patients and everyone else in the street or even city.

And I do realize the only reason the Vatican management is better is because the Vatican is ALSO corrupt ... but with different masters. The improvement is coming from the conflict between these groups. I do get the impression the Vatican is actually the more moral of the two parties, meaning compared to the government, but not by a huge margin.

The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.

Noob question: how private orgs can do surveillance that government can’t?

Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?

[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.

Not as an individual but as a business basically yes

create an LLC and start doing online marketing ("online marketing").

you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.

could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.

chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.

keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.

At times, depending on the state, the government can even put out RFCs specifically to ask for corporations to bid on providing data that the government can't collect itself.

Well, you know it's that time again...

In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;

In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!

It's a software company, it sells software. You can literally go read the docs. It doesn't magically bypass the law anymore than Microsoft Sharepoint does.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry

Do you expect palantir's public documentation to explain how they operate as a spy agency?

Your link and description of it as a software company are irrelevant to the discussion, which concerns their retention and use of personal data. I welcome anyone to give their disclosure a critical reading. (They promise to follow the law- whew!)

https://www.palantir.com/privacy-and-security/

You mean the logging of their web traffic and communications with them like every corporate website does? Can you specify?

I keep thinking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Illegal data gathering was a big deal only 10 years ago. It seems like with businesses like Palantir that this behavior has been normalized to the point where what was unthinkably bad 10 years ago is just business as usual today.

It’s more that many adult citizens (and increasing every year) have grown up with the patriot act and liberties being stripped away in the name of security.

I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.

They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.

What people have "willingly" given their data directly to any company? It's usually buried in an agreement or hidden behind some dark pattern.

Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them.

Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.

Exactly. Most people just don't know how much data is being collected on them, and probably can't know at this point. I say can't because the reality sounds so much like a conspiracy theory that a majority of people would simply reject the truth outright.

It is like 1984. But shit.

It's wild they we are happily buying telescreens. Who would have imagined pre-2000s that would actually happen. And that the number one defense of capitalism would be to use telescreens as an example 'but look at how cheap your telescreen is, TVs were so expensive'.

Did you notice how the Dow is 50,000 ?

was

The naivete or complacency of people who work for so-called "tech" companies that perform wanton, surreptitious data collection about computer users as their core "business model" is illustrated by the belief that what is significant for the surveillance target is how the data is used

Thus, a company performing data collection and sharing it with the government may trigger nerd rage whereas company performing data collection and using the data to help profile ad targets triggers nerd advocacy, i.e., attempts to defend the practice of data collection with "justifications" that have no limit in their level of absurdity

For the surveillance target (cf. the surveilling company), what is significant about data collection is not how the data is used, it is how the data _could_ be used, which is to say, what is significant about data collection is (a) the fact that data is collected at all, not (b) what may or may not happen after the data is collected

Moreover, despite equivocal statements of reassurance in unenforceable "privacy policies" and the like, (b) is often practically impossible for those outside the company and its partners to determine anyway

Hypothetical: Trillion-dollar public company A whose core "business" is data collection and surveillance-supported advertising services takes a nosedive due to unforseen circumstances that affect its ability to sell ad services. Meanwhile, billion-dollar public company B whose core business is data collection and surveillance services for goverments sees their business on the rise. Company A decides to acquire or compete with company B

There is nothing that limits company A's use of the data it has collected for whatever purpose the company and Wall Street deems profitable

As such, the significant issue for the surveillance target is (a) not (b)

Focusing on the fact that company B assists governments whilst company A assists advertisers is a red herring

Once the data is collected, it's too late

Getting call records from the phone company, a private business that collects it's users' data, used to require a warrant. Why is it different now? Only because it's so trivial to hand over access to the database? I think in the past, the only thing that provided protection from illegal searches and seizures was the physical impracticality and friction involved in doing so. The warrant just allowed LEOs to dedicate their limited resources to a particular search. That is no longer a constraint.

Palantir is a threat to all American privacy and likely Democracy given Thiel wants to tear it down and owns Palantir.

This is why government and corporations should not be embedded together as they have near zero laws or punishment for spying on Americans.

It isn't even just about the invasion of our rights but the government shouldn't choose winners and losers like we are seeing. It eliminates the open nature of competition.

A system of corruption - get money from taxpayers, put it into private companies, private companies yield goodies to lobbyists disguised as "politicians". How to break up this milking scheme?

> How to break up this milking scheme?

Oh there is definitely a way it's just that saying most of it outloud will get you disappeared.

Is the software good at what it does? Does it give a good return on investment?

That seems like a question worth knowing the answer to.

A second good question is what are the available competitors?

If the NCY Public Hospitals drop Palantir today, What systems will give them the same functionality at a comparable, (hopefully cheaper) price?

Microsoft also gets millions of dollars from both hospitals, probably. There is a good chance hospitals have computers running Windows and MS-Office. Microsoft also works closely with the Pentagon and whatever "evil" organizations, selling Windows license, cloud services, etc...

Same idea here. Hospitals need some data analytics, which was probably done in Excel before but wasn't sufficient, so they turned to Palantir, because it what they do.

I wish they turned to other solutions that would make better use of public money, I also wish they also didn't use Microsoft software.

Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…

Ok so explain then… this is a forum for discussion after all.

On the contrary, I think it's [pleasantly] surprising that YCombinator threads have finally stopped misunderstanding Palantir.

God knows it took long enough.

Are there any demos of Palantir out there, what sort of things does it do and has anyone tried making an OSS alternative - I don’t really understand why any government would trust them.

AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems.

The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.

If that's an accurate description it's very puzzling that European countries buy services from them.

It is a selective description.

FDE is not the only thing they sell.

Software Licenses for their products (Gotham/Foundry/AIP) is why countries (and businesses) deal with them.

So, they’re basically a traditional consultancy firm focused on data analytics, particularly record linkage?

And methodically operationalizing client work into products.

So, they create powerpoints?

No, the model is closer to AWS sending engineers into orgs to build bespoke solutions, with the platform team providing flexible building blocks rather than each solution being ground up.

They dump all your stuff into a schemaless database and then attach widgets to it.

That's literally it.

It's not even particularly good technology.

It's literally just "better then what people had" + they're willing to work through government and military contracting processes so it can actually be deployed in those environments.

They have a lot of "forward deployed engineer" roles which basically means staff with security clearances who get locked in SCIFs and provide on-site technical support.

Which is really why they keep getting hired: when you write into your contract "it stays on premises and technical support can't take logs off site" they agree to it (at a hefty mark up because all of that sucks to do).

There are many, many, many companies much older than Palantir operating in the beltway that do this. Having TS/SCI cleared resources who can work in SCIFs isn’t in itself a differentiator. Besides, that type of security level would make it very difficult to make use of their products in the first place.

You're missing "better then what they had". It was as I understand it, a big innovation to just bring some post-2010s webdev to the UI experience.

A relevant comparison would be that SpaceX didn't build fancy rockets and their was a lot of similarly old players in the space. They still took it over pretty thoroughly.

Went to a luncheon and sat with some IT Directors at a Fortune 20.

I asked what they were seeing and excited about.

They kept explaining that Foundry (Palantir's SaaS BI platform) is better than EVERY other alternative (and mind you, they've used every other major vendor as an F20). I kept asking what was special about it (Did it re-invent data models? Is it faster/cheaper than MSFT, GOOG, AWS, SNOW?)

I kept getting circular answers (advantages without addressing design consequences) until I realized (to myself) that what they were describing as "great" had nothing to do with the Palantir tech.

It was great because Palantir's sales people had taken a top down approach (getting CEO's blessing) and had the "green light" to greenfield data solutions and cut through internal bureaucracy/silos about connecting datasources to find revenues or savings. This is CEO (since fired) kept bragging to shareholders about rubbing elbows with Palantir's Alex Karp and gleaming with joy about the potential of their AI collaboration.

That's the impression I get about PLTR.

They're like if McKinsey was re-loaded with software, and sales engineers and they hunt C-Suite and government clients to "speak AI." I haven't looked recently, but one bearish sentiment was that they need growth to sustain their high P/E, and there are only so many more governments/CEOs in their addressable market to add.

One of the most telling experiences while following this company was a town hall type of discussion between Karp and I believe former BP CEO. In it, the CEO gushes about how vital Palantir has been in transforming operations and ironing out inefficiencies. But as he continues to talk it becomes apparent he has absolutely no idea what was done or how it helped.

Then the motives became very clear to me- Palantir wants to sell more software by creating an image of a secretive panacea while the c level wants to create an image that they are forward thinking and using cutting edge tools to transform operations. It’s a two way fortuitous grift but I have no doubt the investors pouring money into it have also gotten ensnared in this grift and it’s grown from questionable sales tactics to a full blown bubble.

Two way grift indeed.

When the former CFO becomes CEO and starts talking about the potential of a vendor's black box, it calls into question everything else they've said like thinking a journalist's coverage is accurate until they blunder a topic your familiar with.

What’s there to trust? You use a tool, it finds things you did that you didn’t bill for, you get paid. Where in this is trust required? The guy you’re billing will complain if the bills are inaccurate.

The government IS Palantir at this point, at least J.D. Vance was hand-picked by Thiel.

Musk+Thiel is also in the mix with Golden Dome, the space weapons program that was always Musk's mission. The inside "joke" is that Mars = Wars.

And Golden Dome is just the reheated leftovers of the 80s Star Wars space-based scheme literally dreamed up by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller, and promoted by the Heritage Society as a way to get past MAD and allow the US to start and win WWIII. These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire

> These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.

They already are.. but.. have you seen the DOW?

Michael Burry is extremely bearish on their business model and has written excellent pieces on why he is shorting Palantir.

Burry is probably right, but he forgets that Thiel is friends with Trump, so the merits of business don't matter for Palantir to secure lucrative government contracts.

But is Trump really going to give Palantir a contract allowing Palantir to make 10-15 billion per annum and hand that out to shareholders? That's what's required to get the P/E ratio to 15.

Having things make sense with PE ratios is no longer a requirement. What is Tesla's again?

That's true for a while, but never for ever. But the market is unlikely to be irrational forever.

The valuation is obviously insane. You can't have that kind of P/E ratios.

Same thing with Tesla.

I don't get it either man.

Still have >$300 billion market cap on <$5 billion annual revenues. This is AFTER falling 30% since December.

You can just go sign up...?

https://www.palantir.com/developers/

No one can explain what it is. They have some bullshit “ontology” thing they talk up on every investor call and bots spam about it on twitter and reddit. I think they are basically a software consultancy firm that the government can outsource all evil deeds to. Like warrantless surveillance

Their "ontology" is not bullshit but they speak about it in a bullshit way. I think they refer to it like a product or something they invented as a form of marketing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)

If you just google ontology you probably end up reading some Heidegger and conclude how deep these guys must be.

Whenever I hear Karp say it I always think of it like he is saying "Database" or "The Database". "What makes Palantir different is Database".

I think so much of Palantir is performative and for sales performances.

Here's my lived experience upthread. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029837

You didn't talk about having used it? Talking to my mom about her knitting club and then presenting myself as having a "lived experience" in knitting would be pretty funny.

> in knitting.

Notice how you got vague here?

Is it "lived experience" performing knitting, talking to your mom about knitting, asking how your mom's knitting is different than other knitting and she...struggles?

If you don't see the issue, then you weren't following the thread.

They have an entire youtube channel. For example, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms

Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.

There are a ton of demos. There's nothing special about it. They're bad guys for sure, but in a similar vein to AWS and Microsoft. Those hospitals using AWS would be just as concerning but gather 1% of the comments on HN.

https://archive.is/bK8xU

Take the following crude entities:

- Stones

- Sticks

- Some rope

Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies.

Now take the benign elements of a crud stack:

- Database

- Server

- User system

It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that.

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me

Right?

Bleach and Ammonia are perfectly shelf stable on their own. Mix them up and they're literal poison.

What you've described are just benign ingredients. The poison is turning them into a "analytics" or "adtech" system.

So they get paid to steal personal data? What a deal!

What a steal!

Great headline. I, too, would like a gift of free money from NYC's public hospitals for not doing anything.

Great job NYC. Just like China and Russia.

https://archive.is/bK8xU

Palantir is the ultimate welfare queen.

HHC, a Democratic Party-controlled state corporation, with the NYC administrator of health services as its chairman, is selling health data. Which is ok as long as it's not Palantir or the elected government, apparently. (The elected governments that run the systems.) Get off your high horses, any faux outrage does not fool many.

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