Facebook’s Surveillance Machine

from 5 years ago: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/mysterious...

Palantir ‘wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.’ https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/is-pal...

Yes, that's the same Thiel who is suing Gawker for outing him while developing predictive analytics that disproportionately target minorities.

See: Peter Thiel’s Palantir wins $876 million U.S. Army contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

not just facebook but Silicon Valley has in general a total disregard for privacy. You can't hate on Facebook from another corner of the swamp. Also we should be thinking about what's ahead in IoT (Turning IOT sensor data into behavioral insights) https://www.sentiance.com/

Not to mention the gazillion IoT devices with poor factory reset which is the web's equivalent to delete-account function which only disables a users login but retains the data.

apologies for my emotional tone, this obviously has hit a nerve.

> It is essentially an interface that sits on top of existing data sets and displays data to users for analysis, helping to identify connections otherwise impossible to find. Users do not have to use SQL queries or employ engineers to write strings in order to search petabytes of data. Instead, natural language is used to query data and results are returned in real-time. It is not designed to do any single thing, its main strength is that it is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data. This makes it more useful for managing HUMINT, or intelligence from human sources, than SIGINT, or intelligence from signals.

The problem with Palantir is that everything it is said to be doing is so vague that it could just be colorful dashboards based on not particularly great or new data. For example, this is how the Bloomberg story you linked to describes it:

> Founded in 2004, Palantir is used by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to aggregate far-flung data, find patterns and present results in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics. Its use by police in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and elsewhere has raised ethical concerns about the potential for unfairly targeting minorities.

I'm not arguing whether Palantir is living up to its contracts. Just that it doesn't seem to produce or have the unique and expansive kind of data that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have. Though I guess there's nothing that prevented them from doing a massive data pull from FB's API, in the same way CA managed to do it.

FWIW, not everything about Palantir is necessarily a secret. You can see some descriptions of what they offer and at what price via various FOIA requests that have been done: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=palantir&status=done&us...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/zeynep-tufekci

[2] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300215120/twitter-and-te...

They are leaking and selling data too. Can't find the article at this moment, but there was on HN not long ago.

"Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme.

Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools. For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.

Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference.

It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes.

The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors."

Edit- Source - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262