>With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced

Palantir is SAP with a hollywood marketing department. I talked to a Palantir guy five or six years ago and he said he was happy every time someone portrayed them as a bond villain in the news because the stock went up the next day.

So much of tech abuse is enabled by this, and it's somewhat more pronounced in America, juvenile attitude toward technology, tech companies and CEOs. These people are laughing on their way to the bank because they convinced both critics and evangelists that their SAAS products are some inevitable genius invention

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sosomoxie 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't need sophisticated tech to cause damage, you just need access to data. Palantir is dangerous not because it has some amazing technology that no one else has, it's that they aggregate many data sources of what would be considered private data and expose it with malicious intent (c.f. any interview with the Palantir CEO). Reading my email doesn't require amazing programming, it just requires access.

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deaux 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.

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sosomoxie 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Like I said, their tech is meaningless. It's the deals they cut to gain access to data and the deals they cut to expose that data.

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deaux 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would they be the ones cutting deals to gain access to data? The Party is cutting those deals and has been for ages. Deals like these:

> Spyware delivered by text > In August, the Trump administration revived a previously paused contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded company that makes spyware. A Paragon tool called Graphite was used in Europe earlier this year to target journalists and civil society members, according to The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto with expertise in spyware.

> Little is known about how ICE is using Paragon Solutions technology and legal groups recently sued DHS for records about it and tools made by the company Cellebrite. ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about its Paragon Solutions contract and whether it is for Graphite or another tool.

> Graphite can start monitoring a phone — including encrypted messages — just by sending a message to the number. The user doesn't have to click on a link or a message.

> "It has essentially complete access to your phone," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a legal and policy group focused on privacy. "It's an extremely dangerous surveillance tech that really goes against our Fourth Amendment protections."

Deals with Flock, and so on. It makes no sense for Palantir to be the one doing those deals rather than the Party. They've been doing so for a long time now. That's the whole point of data brokers, on this site alone there are hundreds of comments and posts about how the Party abuses those to get around laws on mass surveillance - can't legally (or are too incompetent to) gather data ourselves? Just buy it off a data broker. And Snowden showed us more than a decade ago that even without them they can just.. not care about the "legal" part.

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sosomoxie 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Palantir is not the only threat, Paragon is equally nasty. Any company with a mission to enable fascism or supremacism is a problem. Palantir is very open about what they strive to do. I have no doubt their tech is mediocre, but their motive is as malicious as it gets.

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deaux 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Of course they're threats. In the exact same way that companies such as AWS/Amazon and Meta, their motive isn't any different. If you think Bezos and Zuckerberg are even a sliver more ethical than Palantir execs I've got some bad news for you.

	▲	sosomoxie 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, but there’s a difference between overt and covert. Overt can normalize this stuff, so it’s good to push back.