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.
Oh there is definitely a way it's just that saying most of it outloud will get you disappeared.
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?
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.
God knows it took long enough.
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.
That's literally it.
It's not even particularly good technology.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.
Same thing with Tesla.
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
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.
- 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?
Notably (though I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice) - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/part-164/section-164.5... describing "similar process authorized under law... material to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry" without any notion of scoping this to individuals vs. broad inquiries, seems to give an incredibly broad basis for Palantir to be asked to spin up a dashboard with PII for any query desired for the administration's political agenda. This could happen at any time in the future, with full retroactive data, across entire hospital systems, complete with an order not to reveal the program's existence to the public.
Other tech companies have seen this kind of generalized overreach as both legally risky and destructive to their brand, and have tried to fight this where possible. Palantir, of course, is the paragon of fighting on behalf of citizens, and would absolutely try to... I can't even finish this joke, I'm laughing too hard.
I'm old enough to remember we literally had a Captain America movie, barely more than a decade ago, where the villains turn private PII and health data into targeting lists. (No flying aircraft carriers were injured in the filming of this movie.)
Clearly, we learned the wrong lesson there.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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
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.
There are multiple layers of corruption at work here. (They also cap the number of doctors, and clinics, etc).
This doesn't seem surprising on its face given that a hospital is, not unreasonably, a heavily regulated entity.
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.
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.
Zoning, construction permits, occupancy permits, patio permits, food licenses, liquor licenses, health inspections, dumpster permits, etc
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.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;
In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry
that’s what the article is discussing? the journalists found evidence.
i’m confused what you’re confused about.
this whole entire comment section is birthed from the evidence someone found.
It's entirely left up to the reader to fill in the blanks that whatever is going on with this contract is nefarious and bad.
The Intercept used to do good work, but this article is complete trash. At least the author was self aware enough to reference the 2016 reporting.
there is absolutely evidence a government agency is using palantir. the very beginning of the article:
> New York City’s public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir ... automated scanning of patient health notes to “Increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show.
later it explains:
> Palantir’s contract with New York’s public health care system allows the company to work with patients’ protected health information, or PHI ... Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.
so a government agency is allowing palantir access to private health information to use for other purposes other than research.
again, i dont know what kind of "evidence" you're looking for, but much of the conversation ive seen revolves around those two pieces of the article.
those two pieces of "evidence" i find to be terrifying if it were any data brokerage, but considering what we know about palantir and its founders/leaders its even moreso. and again, it seems entirely appropriate for the discussions to happen from the "evidence" the article puts forward.
the government should not be sharing private health information with private corporations "...for purporses other than research" and it absolutely shouldnt be using those data brokers to sidestep warrantless data collection protections.
if you think the government should be able to amass enormous dossiers on all of its citizens, thats fine, you're entirely within your right to think thats rad, but we're also allowed to think this directional shift is absolutely terrifying.
This tells us almost nothing. You're obviously a cynic (understandable) about technology here, but this journalist could've done a lot more work to actually explain to the reader the nature of this so-called "research". Is it defined in the contract (most likely)? How long do they get access to this data? Are there other constraints? Has Palantir violated any terms of this contract (The Intercept is intimating that they are in at position to know this, since they have the contract materials so they say) with regard to use of this data? Are there reporting requirements if the terms of the contract are violated? Is Palantir required to notify New York about the use of PHI for these research purposes?
The Intercept doesn't tell us any of this, which to me suggests that there's not a lot of "there" there. Did they ask anyone in a position to know about the contract? No, they didn't, all they did was send a gotcha email to the mayor's office. This is not journalism.
>the government should not be sharing private health information with private corporations
How exactly do you think Medicaid/Medicare works? Private corporations handle PHI all the time. There is an entire industry that exists to do exactly that.
>if you think the government should be able to amass enormous dossiers on all of its citizens,
TFA doesn't say this.
Look, Palantir and others involved in XKS and all the rest of warrantless and illegal surveillance activity do not get the benefit of the doubt. My problem here is that this article is shit, is intended to generate clicks, and the quality of investigative journalism on this topic is a pile of hot garbage. There's dozens of other questions this journalist should've gone out and investigated but, no, it was easier to drop in two paragraphs that tell the reader nothing, and then build up a bunch of ancillary observations about other work that governments and private corporations do (all legal, btw) to make everything sound as inflammatory as possible without actually informing anyone of anything.
if we take all context away and only look at this in some weird isolated island, sure, "lets wait for more information", but ignoring wide swaths of context is honestly kind of silly. we don't do that in the real world: courts take context into consideration, military takes context into consideration, board rooms take context into consideration, household planning takes context into consideration, data hoarding takes context into consideration, and on and on. when we consider wider context, yes, this is an incredibly worrying trend.
i don't know how many different government agencies would need to feed data/slurp data to/from these private data brokers before you would feel comfortable calling it out, but it clearly isn't at that point yet, and that's ok. you're entitled to your opinions, and so is everyone else. much of the conversation here indicates those people are concerned that its very quickly getting worse.
it doesn't matter if its bush's administration, clinton's, biden's, or trump's, this is gathering momentum and i think its wrong, regardless of who is in charge.
we've been moving towards a situation where privacy dynamics are flipping on their head. we are now at a point where those with the most power expect complete privacy and cry foul when people reveal their deeds. while those with the least amount power, if they wish to engage with society on any meaningful level are forbidden to have privacy. this is yet another example of the government and private companies working together making this new lack of privacy dynamic worse.
> if you think the government should be able to amass enormous dossiers on all of its citizens,
you're correct here, i misspoke, i should have said access rather than amass:
if you think the government should be able to access enormous dossiers amassed by a private company to use against its citizens that's fine, you're entirely within your right to think that's rad, but others are also allowed to think this directional shift is absolutely terrifying.
https://www.palantir.com/privacy-and-security/