alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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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
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.
> 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.
Did you notice how the Dow is 50,000 ?
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.
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.
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.