> like Palantir: a secretive artificial intelligence outfit
This is a funny way of describing Palantir. They are just consultants plus data management software. That’s it. They are no more “AI” than any company that can run Python pipelines.
I’m not sure if this is PR by Palantir trying to up their stock. Or stupid press not understanding data engineering.
I believe the concerns raised are valid. Palantir had CIA as the only client for years. Was “adopted” in Greece right after Pompeo’s visit. A coincidence? Maybe. The company and the CEO have a questionable reputation and ideas about things I value like “democracy”, it was given to the Greek state for “free” apparently and in 2020 we all know what “free” means. To top it all, Palantir has already being accused of selling public records data obtained by police departments in US states to private corporations. So for all we know they are just funneling data to the CIA and selling data to private corporations while providing trivial “big data” services to governments.
By the way, the EU is monitoring Palantir’s presence in Europe. There is feeling that Palantir’a services are “planted” rather than “requested”.
Before Snowden one could argue these are wild conspiracies, post-Snowden, I cannot think of a reason for a government to accept official spyware on its digital soil other than lack of sovereignty.
Would China and Russia accept Palantir as a big data analysis system to fight COVID?
They also have made a big push into the data of NGOs and the UN. Many of which collect very sensitive data in some countries with some very complex political, economic and social issues. Palantir was often doing this for free. Maybe it's the cynic in me but in the same way I'd guess NSO Group does in the Middle East, somewhere something would be phoning home to Palantir's bigger customers (CIA, NSA) etc
I can’t find any source for this. In-q-tel was an early finder but they spun out of PayPal and have always had PayPal and finance as clients from inception.
Playing devil's advocate here for discussion purposes:
Isn't the 1st step of any AI to collect as much pertinent data as possible? The potential I see in Palantir is that they have the base infrastructure covered (talent, tech stack, business relationships) to connect to all sorts of disconnected database sources.
The 2nd step will be to analyze that data for insights using opensource or in-house engineered algorithms - not Palantir's role right now.
Ex: My past firm played with Datarobot's AI solutions which tried to outsource data scientists as "consultants" but did not work very well due to lack of data engineering/domain expertise.
Could this be Palantir's next move?
Note: This may sound mildly speculative, but trying to approach it from an engineering and business perspective.
I’m not aware of any Palantir contracts that let them use, model with, or analyze data outside of designated purposes. It’s pretty hard to audit cloud services that claim to have isolated dbs, but it seems like such a massive breach of contract if they were actually doing this.
It’s the same risk if Microsoft cracked open all the sql dbs to analyze and train AIs. Or if AWS tried to use data stored with them. I’m sure it would be useful but would break every contract they have and since they are trying to make money off cloud services that’s a big risk for minimal return.
So unless there’s more evidence just saying something is possible is a rabbit hole for every cloud provider, right?
Anybody could understand the difference between data engineering and "AI" in 30 mins of research, which is a lot less time than they have to research a story. Whenever a journalist "doesn't understand" something that could be learned with a simple google search, it's not stupidity, it's malicious. In this case the journalist is pretending to write a story about Palantir winning a contract, but really writing a part of the continuing story "Palantir (and the tech industry in general) is evil and powerful and you should be scared."
Rather the continuing story "Palantir is an extremely competent, extremely advanced company from the future that spreads secret sauce on data that can turn it into fuel for their mind control technologies" that Palantir and the people who direct contracts to them propagate themselves.
This is just another case of journalists responding to tech companies own PR because they entirely operate from press releases and marketing material. See Cambridge Analytics.
Dropbox is a total solution. It takes about 5 clicks and 10 minutes and you are getting the core values out of the product.
Buying palantir is similar to buying IBM Watson. It is going to take months before anything is being installed. Most of what they are doing is consulting and database administration
> a secretive artificial intelligence outfit founded by a Trump-backing billionaire
I'm in no way a Trump-fan, but sentences like the above immediately puts me into the opinion that this article is going to be one-sided - and hence I stopped reading. I don't read www.opendemocracy.net (first time I've encountered it), so perhaps that's there thing?
I think they are referring to Peter Thiel. Thiel gave a speech at the 2016 RNC in support of their nominee, Donald Trump. At the time through the present, Thiel continues to have a net worth in excess of $1 billion.
Is it the adjective secretive that turned you away?
No... come on, I think it’s obvious what they should have said:
“billionaire investor Peter Thiel.”
The man has an identity outside just being a “Trump backer”. Using that descriptor specifically chooses a minor, politically motivated detail about someone and concludes to the rightful reaction of turning away.
Choosing to write a “news” article while also choosing descriptors like that make this an opinion piece, not a news article. I think it’s what is fundamentally wrong with most of the Information passed around today; you can’t escape the opinions buried neatly inside EVERY article, desperately persuading you to think and feel a certain way. Everything’s hostile these days, just constantly attacking your mindset.
My understanding is that the parent comment isn't trying to pose as a 'news article' and therefore is not implicitly accepting to adhere to vanishing standards of integrity and delivery of the information.
A HN user / comment can be as biased and editorialized as they like, the same shouldn't be true for ' traditional media outlets ' whatever that means.
As far as I'm concerned, it is objectively true that this is a minor, politically motivated detail although it is still relevant information. They could have mentioned that somewhere in the article without appending it as a prefix / title to his name. That's rather disingenuous. It's not his main defining characteristic.
That being said, I believe one should not necessarily turn away from what they perceive to be propaganda of one kind or another, but rather view it as such and analyse it, although this can be irritating at times.
FWIW, Thiel has also backed 48+ other political candidates over the years, maybe we should add all of that to his name ? ;
Barring the fact that I don't expect to get journalistic integrity from a source such as "opendemocracy.net", I wanted to still highlight the irresponsibility in describing an individual like Thiel in such a specific way.
I see how you could form this point, but I also strongly disagree.
A quick Google on Thiel reveals he's 53 years old and has led a life FULL of detail that dwarfs his political choices in the last 4 years. One could write very thick books on this individuals life (and it looks like they already have in some context).
Using the descriptor of 'Trump Backer' is deliberately prioritizing one single personal choice the subject individual made in a time representing roughly <7% of his total existence.
I don't think it's editorial to say it's politically motivated at all. If you simply remove the specific subject matter of the descriptor used and instead, rely on its representation of the overall individual, its statistical irrelevance to the whole easily identifies its gross misuse as title descriptor of that individual.
I would go as far to say, that not only is it not editorial to arrive to such a conclusion, I think it hard-pressed to not describe it as a factual occurrence.
For some reason across many sites I go on it seems every Palantir deal warrants a post. It feels like astroturfing. Like there's some campaign of "hey this company sure is shady, but look at all these consistent gov contracts! gee whiz it's just gonna be a good investment though! Better get in!"
> "it could involve an ‘unprecedented’ transfer of citizens’ private health information to controversial private firms like Palantir"
Probably a dumb question, but - if every other entity in the EU has to comply with GDPR rules, why don't they have to? How is it that the government can pass the data so freely to Palantir? I know that GDPR won't apply anymore after the 1st of Jan, but it still applied during the transition period?
GDPR does apply. UK has it implemented as domestic legislation. Lots of confusion and FUD about this. We have exactly the same rules today as we will in 2021.
So then the question is justified - how is it that if I go to gov.uk, the first popup I get is whether I accept cookies for data privacy. Yet they will seemingly get to send sensitive NHS data without consulting the respective owners of that information?
I'm certainly not pretending to be nowhere near knowledgeable about the topic, and it would be great to hear from someone that does, but it seems to me that the public has legal GDPR grounds on which to protest this data transfer? I, for one, certainly don't want Palantir holding my data.
For general information, the GDPR makes specific provision for processing of personal data in the public interest[1] and in particular for processing of sensitive personal data (including health data) in relation to public health situations[2]. Explicit consent is not necessarily required by the GDPR in such situations[3].
However, there is also an obligation under Article 9 to have "law which provides for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject, in particular professional secrecy", and more generally the provisions of the GDPR about acceptable processing and protecting data subjects still apply.
Recital 54 also specifically states, "Such processing of data concerning health for reasons of public interest should not result in personal data being processed for other purposes by third parties such as employers or insurance and banking companies."
So as things stand, it appears that the UK government won't necessarily be in violation of the GDPR by giving personal health data to Palantir, but any processing will only be legal if the required safeguards are explicitly encoded in law and if that data is not being processed by Palantir for any other purposes.
The GDPR requires data controllers to ensure data processors respect GDPR rights, so the public could protest if they don’t think Palantir will do that. But there’s no GDPR provision requiring user consent to a controller’s choice of processors.
Austria, Greece and another EU country have already adopted the same software. I believe there are some exceptions to GDPR when governments are involved.
The terms are written so that they come into effect after the 1st of Jan. Just as how FB and Twitter will start the process of moving data to the US after Jan 1st.
Ah good, another win for Brexit. Truly, unmitigated success.
It's amazing how the pro vote was to strengthen the sovereignty of Britain outside of the EU and all indications are that sovereignty was just, uh, transferred to anyone who will pay in exchange for stop-the-bleeding type trade deals.
Always telling people, if you’re looking for massive returns on an investment, you should be picking up Palantir stock. This company will be huge. Posting this now so I can link it later in a year.
I’m not sure about that. There are plenty of other companies and funds that will return more that don’t come with the ethical and moral baggage. When you wake up 10 years from now, will it be a world you want to live in?
It is interesting to hear this argument in Silicon Valley’s double standards and modern “relative moralism” environment. What exactly are your moral concerns? It is “controversial” because people have so many diff. opinions on what is considered “ethical” these days.
Palantir has a bad rap in SV because liberal media likes to criticize it mainly due to its work with ICE.
There are articles online speculating on the validity of Karp’s claims about his philosophy background, or Palantir’s rumors on helping take down Osama Bin Laden as intentional propaganda. I suspect a lot of these comes as misinformation campaigns to discredit the firm.
I tried to investigate a report by Mijente and stopped early due to its data being mostly baseless personal accusations on Thiel (common tactic when pertinent proof is lacking), which seems primarily motivated by a political agenda
Help me if I am wrong, but to me it seems the media is being heavily biased against Palantir because the firm denounced Silicon Valley’s values...
Note: Another analogy of double standards is how Apple and Tesla get all the hype, masqueraded by “user privacy” and “saving the environment” PR, while online communities (HN, Reddit) brush away human right violations such as slave labor or work abuse allegations. The brainwashing is clearly working...
Palantir has a bad rap everywhere. It is a big surveillance stock. Do you know the story of Monsanto? The other companies you mention all have the redeeming qualities that you mentioned but Palantir doesn’t. Facebook isn’t all wonderful but they did give ReactJS and other really nice web technologies to the world. Palantir has given what?... nothing. Palantir’s performance from here can be more like Uber’s.. which is yawning compared to heavy hitters like PACB or SQ.
I don't know why people get caught up in the "ethical and moral baggage". You have no real power to determine what the world in 10 years will look like. You do however have the ability to control what your world looks like, when you are sitting on bags of money. Sail in the direction of the wind, not against it.
That’s like saying your vote doesn’t matter, so why vote?! I will still be a millionaire one day regardless of my ethical views because I know how to invest money well; the only question is when. Tesla and Nio are up in a large part because investors just want to see Tesla and Nio in their future. It’s a nudge towards green energy like all the green energy stocks. It’s not the little guys pulling the strings, it’s the big whales that have more money than they know what to do with and that brings a different kind of incentives. Look at SeaWorld Holdings. Not the best financials and doesn’t always make a profit but people love going to Busch Gardens because it’s a wonderful paradise and they want it to stay in their future. All 3 of these companies I mentioned are outperforming that surveillance and spying stock for good reasons.
You might not be convinced yet so here’s some further evidence. First look at the websites of Morningstar and see how much of the screen real estate is dedicated towards ethical and responsible investments. Years ago, this didn’t exist. Look at the returns of VOO vs. ESGV now. You’ll see that ESGV has outperformed VOO!
Do you know what sucks more than being on the bad side? Being on the bad and the loosing side. :)
> I don't know why people get caught up in the "ethical and moral baggage"... You do however have the ability to control what your world looks like, when you are sitting on bags of money. Sail in the direction of the wind, not against it.
Make money, if people get hurt, it was a likely outcome, so why not benefit financially?
When the options are either wake up in a shitty world and have no money or wake up in a shitty world and have a lot of money I don’t know why people choose the former. Maybe some sort of “survivors guilt”.
If your options are either to have no money or bags of money, you’re in a casino. To play the stock market well, you need an investor’s mindset not a casino mindset. I say this with 12 years of investment experience and 20% CAGR. Odds are, your risk management and portfolio are not well risk/return adjusted. It’s important to many people that the world they retire in is the world they want to live in. Most millionaire investors say it was harder to get to $100k than it was to get from $100k to $1M anyways. Often, if you make it that far, you can make it the rest of the way through the same compound interest.
> When the options are either wake up in a shitty world and have no money or wake up in a shitty world and have a lot of money I don’t know why people choose the former.
I am not seeing how this is helpful to you or anyone really, but respect that we all have different experiences.
I was once hacked, stalked and targeted by friends of a celebrity who I had just met. I tried pursuing help about it and was threatened with murder. Then, after promising to report the murder threat, I was told by another person in that social circle that if I talked about the previous incidents that my career reputation would be permanently ruined.
The last person told me in the same conversation that Peter Thiel would recognize him. As Mr. Thiel has many interests, there was no reason to believe this person was connected to Palantir. However, Palantir sure came to mind while I processed this last interaction like a deer in headlights.
I can only speculate, but it was during the course of a reference check for someone connected to this circle. So, likely this was done to look into me, demonstrate power over me, and let me know they are "watching".
many celebs have personal protection details. how such protection details behave likely varies widely..
as for your concerns, pay close attention to your cybersecurity posture before engaging with people who will draw attention to you simply by association.
This is a funny way of describing Palantir. They are just consultants plus data management software. That’s it. They are no more “AI” than any company that can run Python pipelines.
I’m not sure if this is PR by Palantir trying to up their stock. Or stupid press not understanding data engineering.