alt Hacker NewsUK Discord users were part of a Peter Thiel-linked data collection experiment
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Let's be fair: almost everything is linked to Peter Thiel's dark magic company these days.
The UK's NHS is already quite close with Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/uk/
Can somebody tell me what's behind Thiel's obsession with Antichrist?
funny how the FAQ disclaimer about Persona already vanished from the site. not a great look when your transparency lasts shorter than the data retention.
The use of "experiment" really irks me. Might be useful internally but running an involuntary experiment that users are forced to participate in to continue using a service they may pay for is straight up hostile- not even to mention the nature of the experiment handling sensitive personal data.
What I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.).
That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces.
What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.
The title should include Palantir too
> I know children aren't responsible for the sins of their parents, but it doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here that Palantir's UK division is headed by Oswald Mosley's grandson.
"ad-hominem is ugly and wrong, like you"
Let's pretend that age verification is a valid need -- is there a way using cryptographic approaches to viably allow an end user to prove that they meet the criteria without sharing other data that they don't want third parties to have access to?
Remember when I said fuck discord and people came to defend them and say “but surely they aren’t keeping the data”…
They are not friendly.
I honestly am glad that all of this is happening, because any time a conservative in the future starts complaining about government overreach, the only response to them should be is that "well, this is what you like".
>Discord have belatedly confirmed that they're working with Persona, an identity detection firm backed by a fund directed by Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, as part of Discord's new global age verification system rollout.
>As PCGamer note, Persona's lead investors during two recent rounds of venture capital funding were Founders Fund, who valued them at $1.5 billion in 2021. The Founders Fund was co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2020.
>Palantir have, among other things, worked extensively with the USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, [...]
The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to Palantir or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Thiel, but is there any evidence for this? For instance, is Thiel known for meddling in the affairs of the companies his fund invests in, or pushing them together for collabs like what Musk does (eg. with x/x.ai/spacex)?