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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

"what is Fivecast ONYX? an AI-powered surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million and CBP for additional license costs. according to Fivecast’s own documentation and EFF’s reporting, they do automated collection of multimedia data from social media and dark web, build “digital footprints” from biographical data, tracks shifts in sentiment and emotion, assigns risk scores, searches across 300+ platforms and 28+ billion data points, identifies people with “violent tendencies”"

Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?

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According to Persona's damage control article[0], the subdomain had "onyx" in its name because that's the internal code name for the project, and it's named after the pokémon Onyx. No connection to Fivecast ONYX.

[0] https://withpersona.com/blog/post-incident-review-source-map...

I don't really understand why ICE would have a Persona OPenAI connection...?

Really? Sounds like they are a customer.

I am not sure summoning Nintendo due to trademark infringement will help with damage control. ;-)

Naming a fantasy creature after a common gemstone should make it non-trademarkable anyway, but I'd love to see Nintendo tie up the US government in court for years.

Not a crime, necessarily, just a hefty debit against your social credit score.

On a macro scale, in Australia if you don't have a paid private health policy, you get slugged with additional tax come tax time. The same could happen here - "oh, you don't have social media? Well the state needs more tax from you to pay for your additional state surveillance"

Could it though? I have lived in rural areas and urban areas of the US. This speaks more to the rural areas than the urban, but only marginally--Americans like their firearms, they're suspicious of The Government, and they don't much care for the tax man. And by and large they like to be left the fuck alone. If the revenuers show up demanding too much we have a rich and storied history of mistreating them.

How's that working out right now?

Yeah, turns out Americans (rural or not) prefer creature comforts like Amazon and Netflix over exercising their 2A rights. All talk.

Source: American observing what’s going on right now.

82% of US households have an Amazon Prime subscription while only 30% own a gun.

Or a precursor to minority report precrime

It's an interesting conundrum.. I've always viewed "the law" as something that doesn't really materialize until you're arrested, arraigned, tried, and sentenced. So "breaking" the law and "getting away with it" isn't actually "illegal" it's just... normal. The law only matters if some filthy rat narc catches you and summons the pigs. Not sure how any of that adjusts in this scenario, really.

Joke’s on them, I’ve been LARPing as a tech founder since childhood.

I am not that old and I remember when people warned other to put too much info on social media. You can even identify people through a few sentences and some people have basically a complete life encyclopedia about themselves online. Sure, those are usually not the most influential for political developments besides being called influencers.

Recent paper by Nicholas Carlinini and others really showcases how little it takes to deanonymize users across platforms with LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

We need a list of these 300+ platforms

I'm 99% sure this is one of them. I thought 404media posted a leaked list of the platforms once but I can't find it. Search is dead (this is a general statement)

It's safe to assume any publicly accessible website is one of them or will be in the near future.

It's already frowned upon when crossing the border

Finally, a use for my LinkedIn account. In fact I think I might start posting AI slop to it.

> How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?

Ah, it already is. Just being trialed against people with less rights and no voting power.

Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.

If you think the government is spending a hundred billions on this category of tech for vetting a few thousand people, you are a prime candidate to buy a bridge that I can sell you for a discount.

> Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.

I don’t think this is true. You can get a visa just fine if you don’t have social media profiles. Source: me. I don’t have facebook, insta, twitter etc and travel to the US just fine. When I filled in the form I left those empty.

What I think you can’t do is get a visa if you have social media profiles and choose not to disclose them or you post things or have friends/links on your social media that cbp considers elevates your risk etc.

Leaving it empty is getting visas rejected nowadays.

Can I just ask gpt to ask me questions to create my profile directly? I can't be bothered with any social media. Whatever it is supposed to addict me with is missing, I just find it all very boring.

I got into the USA in September last year. On my esta I put a private instagram account I begrudgingly made to talk to some friends, and my LinkedIn. I guess that’s enough data?

They swiped through the photo gallery on your phone, right? (Standard for years from what I know based on Latin America to USA)

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