221–230 of 281 posts
Related HN thread: ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117
ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117 - Jan 2026 (941 comments – 18 hours)
Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just becaus…
The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
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> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough. I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to…
> Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe... I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad,…
These kinds of mass surveillance data ops should be illegal, regardless of who is doing it.
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> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans It’s the legally-correct term. For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.
Genocide starts with separating people into them and us, and this process starts with words.
This is an unsubstantiated slippery slope. We can categorize people, even sort them by desirability for some purpose, without resorting to dehumanization much less genocide. (Citizenship and immigration necessitate an us-them delineation. So do team sports, families and like club memberships. Us and them are fine. Us versus them is dangerous.)
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HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.
I’m against using health data to benefit ICE but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. There needs to be a critical mass of data for it to be useful to Palantir. If they are passing Medicare and Medicaid data, does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
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They almost exclusively hire fresh grads who need money more than ethics, and it shows in everything they do.
Exactly like any other big tech (Google, Microsoft, etc) or consulting (McKinsey, Deloitte, etc) company! There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Govern…
Related HN thread: ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m against using health data to benefit ICE but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. There needs to be a critical mass of data for it to be useful to Palantir. If they are passing Medicare and Medicaid data, does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
> If they are passing Medicare and Medicaid data It’s not. Palantir “receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)” [1]. That’s broader than Medicare or Medicaid. If you’re on a legal visa and have to get a prescription filled, I think you’ll wind up in those data. (Same if you are legally on Medicare with a spouse who overstayed their visa.) > does that mean that undocumented mig…
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The should be separable, but they are not . Data collected privately absorbed by the government is a serious problem, even anonymized data can be de-anonymized if you can put more than one database next to each other. This allows for far more insights than any single database could give you and this is a real danger. Keep in mind that DOGE made off with a huge stash of data, which combined with other data, such as vo…
> Data collected privately absorbed by the government is a serious problem The data we’re talking about here are home addresses. HHS (or the IRS) having home addresses isn’t what most Americans would or should consider problematic.