alt Hacker NewsConsidering that other agencies have been using palantir (and other data whores) to sidestep established norms on gathering/using information against its citizens, and considering that the article pointed to just some of the other well known instances of those other agencies using that private company, i think its entirely reasonable for people to discuss "this situation is concerning".
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.
Okay, so, your point appears to be that the government sharing any data with the private sector for any purpose is axiomatically bad, and this is because your null hypothesis is that doing so is going to have deleterious effects on privacy norms. If that's your point, it's certainly a defensible one. My original point was that this article does not provide evidence one way or another in that regard because it is (very) poorly researched and executed. Perhaps I am making a meta point that, in order for those who hold your views to more convincingly argue the case, the evidentiary standards need to be raised because otherwise it just looks like noise - and in particular re: Palantir, there is an enormous amount of FUDD and mystery (intentional or otherwise) around what they do, and as a result of this people reflexively revert to "data sharing bad, BigCorp evil" like this is a Marvel comic book movie. Not saying you are doing that, but any time this company comes up the comments become retrenched and the usual technical depth that this website is supposed to be known for goes out the window.