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Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals(theintercept.com)
167 points by cdrnsf 3 hours ago | 55 comments
marysminefnuf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It seems like the sole purpose of palantir is to give data to the government they wouldnt have access to without a warrant. So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled??? The difference between now and a few years ago seems to be that companies are assisting law enforcement with even more advanced datacollection.

bebop 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.

glaslong 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.

colechristensen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.

thfuran 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I don't want to see any more landmark cases from the current supreme court.

leftbrainstrain 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.

b00ty4breakfast an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".

spwa4 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)

A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.

This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.

Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.

And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)

throwaw12 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Palantir gives the health data to government

Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it

dheera 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

The problem with today's society is you walk into a hospital bleeding and they make you sign an ultimatum.

Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.

If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.

mistrial9 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.

If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.

wizzwizz4 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.

mistrial9 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.

>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that

> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"

> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals

> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)

I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.

The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.

coliveira an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.

bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled???

It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.

hinata08 2 hours ago | parent [-]

correct

PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.

The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight

I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site

pylua 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How is it guaranteed to be the same accuracy of data that is not retrieved through a warrant ?

greedo 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Parallel construction. They get enough data, legal or not, to know who to look for. Then they surveil you until you slip.

pavel_lishin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It just needs to be accurate-enough to eventually get a warrant.

hinata08 2 hours ago | parent [-]

you don't need warrants to query these databases

They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data

You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.

If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it

pavel_lishin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, I understand they don't need a warrant for the databases. I'm saying that they use the databases to get enough data for a warrant that they wouldn't be able to get without the databases.

runarberg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I keep thinking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Illegal data gathering was a big deal only 10 years ago. It seems like with businesses like Palantir that this behavior has been normalized to the point where what was unthinkably bad 10 years ago is just business as usual today.

shevy-java 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is like 1984. But shit.

einpoklum 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, you know it's that time again...

In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;

In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!

crimsoneer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a software company, it sells software. You can literally go read the docs. It doesn't magically bypass the law anymore than Microsoft Sharepoint does.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry

malfist an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Do you expect palantir's public documentation to explain how they operate as a spy agency?

crimsoneer an hour ago | parent [-]

It's a huge company with loads of corporate clients... has anybody found any evidence of some secret backdoor? Or are we just speculating?

coliveira an hour ago | parent [-]

They don't need a backdoor, the whole company is a backdoor receiving sensitive information from governments 24x7.

jonnybgood an hour ago | parent [-]

So Palantir receives info from governments only to… hand it back to them? It seems like most people really don’t know what Palantir actually does and are just speculating.

oscaracso an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Your link and description of it as a software company are irrelevant to the discussion, which concerns their retention and use of personal data. I welcome anyone to give their disclosure a critical reading. (They promise to follow the law- whew!)

https://www.palantir.com/privacy-and-security/

jonnybgood an hour ago | parent [-]

You mean the logging of their web traffic and communications with them like every corporate website does? Can you specify?

altcunn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The data laundering aspect of this is what concerns me most. The constitutional framework was designed around a world where gathering information about citizens required effort and left a trail. Now the economics have flipped - collection is cheap and invisible, and the only friction is legal, which gets routed around by purchasing from intermediaries.

Healthcare data is especially sensitive because it creates coercion vectors that other data types do not. If you know someone's diagnosis, their medication, their hospital visits, you can apply pressure in ways that go far beyond targeted advertising. This is why HIPAA exists, and why routing around it via a government contractor should trigger much more scrutiny than it currently receives.

The technical reality is that once data is aggregated at scale, the original context of collection becomes irrelevant. It does not matter that each individual piece was collected for a legitimate purpose. The aggregate creates capabilities that none of the individual collection points consented to.

esbranson 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

HIPAA privacy arose indirectly from its administrative simplification provisions concerning its main goal of standardized electronic health data. Privacy is not "why HIPAA exists".

shevy-java 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A system of corruption - get money from taxpayers, put it into private companies, private companies yield goodies to lobbyists disguised as "politicians". How to break up this milking scheme?

rebolek 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So they get paid to steal personal data? What a deal!

noupdates an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Take the following crude entities:

- Stones

- Sticks

- Some rope

Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies.

Now take the benign elements of a crud stack:

- Database

- Server

- User system

It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that.

Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me

Right?

brandensilva 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Palantir is a threat to all American privacy and likely Democracy given Thiel wants to tear it down and owns Palantir.

This is why government and corporations should not be embedded together as they have near zero laws or punishment for spying on Americans.

It isn't even just about the invasion of our rights but the government shouldn't choose winners and losers like we are seeing. It eliminates the open nature of competition.

rubberband 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.is/bK8xU

andy_ppp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are there any demos of Palantir out there, what sort of things does it do and has anyone tried making an OSS alternative - I don’t really understand why any government would trust them.

_diyar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems.

The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.

rorylawless an hour ago | parent | next [-]

So, they’re basically a traditional consultancy firm focused on data analytics, particularly record linkage?

CuriouslyC 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

And methodically operationalizing client work into products.

worldsayshi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If that's an accurate description it's very puzzling that European countries buy services from them.

Krasnol an hour ago | parent [-]

It is a selective description.

FDE is not the only thing they sell.

Software Licenses for their products (Gotham/Foundry/AIP) is why countries (and businesses) deal with them.

nimrody an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They have an entire youtube channel. For example, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms

Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.

estetlinus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Michael Burry is extremely bearish on their business model and has written excellent pieces on why he is shorting Palantir.

asdff 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Burry is probably right, but he forgets that Thiel is friends with Trump, so the merits of business don't matter for Palantir to secure lucrative government contracts.

infinitewars 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The government IS Palantir at this point, at least J.D. Vance was hand-picked by Thiel.

Musk+Thiel is also in the mix with Golden Dome, the space weapons program that was always the mission. The inside "joke" is that Mars = Wars.

mullingitover 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

And Golden Dome is just the reheated leftovers of the 80s Star Wars space-based scheme literally dreamed up by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller, and promoted by the Heritage Society as a way to get past MAD and allow the US to start and win WWIII. These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire

crimsoneer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can just go sign up...?

https://www.palantir.com/developers/

SilverElfin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one can explain what it is. They have some bullshit “ontology” thing they talk up on every investor call and bots spam about it on twitter and reddit. I think they are basically a software consultancy firm that the government can outsource all evil deeds to. Like warrantless surveillance

renewiltord 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What’s there to trust? You use a tool, it finds things you did that you didn’t bill for, you get paid. Where in this is trust required? The guy you’re billing will complain if the bills are inaccurate.

SMAAART 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://archive.is/bK8xU

googaar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…

wasmainiac an hour ago | parent [-]

Ok so explain then… this is a forum for discussion after all.