>Discord have belatedly confirmed that they're working with Persona, an identity detection firm backed by a fund directed by Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, as part of Discord's new global age verification system rollout.

>As PCGamer note, Persona's lead investors during two recent rounds of venture capital funding were Founders Fund, who valued them at $1.5 billion in 2021. The Founders Fund was co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2020.

>Palantir have, among other things, worked extensively with the USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, [...]

The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to Palantir or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Thiel, but is there any evidence for this? For instance, is Thiel known for meddling in the affairs of the companies his fund invests in, or pushing them together for collabs like what Musk does (eg. with x/x.ai/spacex)?

I think it's prudent to assume that these companies are selling your information to anyone with two nickels to rub together, regardless of which tech celebrities they are linked to.

It doesn't matter if he's known to meddle in the affairs of the companies in which he owns equity stakes. Owning the stake means he could meddle.

Peter Thiel's personal brand and Palantir are so toxic and creepy in the eyes of most of the public that you can basically just substitute 'Satan' in any statement involving them, and that's how it looks to regular people. Try it:

"The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to [one of Satan's companies] or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Satan"

So for anyone who cares about PR at all, the immediate instinct upon discovering you might be linked them is to reverse course and apologize profusely to your users.

Do we need evidence beyond it being linked to Thiel? Being linked to one of the most evil people in America seems like more than enough to me.

All these people are in the same rotten ideological boat. It's safe to assume that, as long as they're not competing for the same pile of money, they're cooperating. If not now, then eventually.

> is there any evidence for this

I'm not sure. What I am pretty sure about is that none of those age verifying services are rolled out to protect children. Hence the question: then what for? And the only logical answer to this question is that one: to harvest data.

It’s a pretty safe assumption that any headline prominently featuring “Thiel-“ will not be substantiated by its article body. If we applied this standard of evidence to every pair of entities separated by one or two degrees of common investor, we’d have a whole industry of tainted corporations with dubious motives. (Oh wait…)

Mentioning Palantir on the internet right now is like socially acceptable qanon, in that any semblance of critical thinking or evidence is rapidly discarded if it gets in the way of a good story.

In general, I would expect an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete any sensitive records my customers are uploading, unless I explicitly opt-in otherwise. My guess is in this case that Discord is attempting to train its own models for first-pass verification, so this is a training corpus; there's no evidence that Persona's doing anything with Palantir, other than proximity of funding.

The broader issue here is that SV VC is starting to feel mildly radioactive when it comes to public opinion; Persona's previous lead fund (up through its Series B) was Index, run by the more conventionally-liberal Neil Rimer, and no one worried about that. The entanglement of Silicon Valley's oligarch class in very extreme politics* at a time of very fraught national political upheaval is making VC money politically-exposed money; if you take FF or Sequioa cash, how certain are you that they won't just get involved in your business, but push you to take specific political or social positions that serve their non-fiscal interests? How certain are your customers that that isn't happening to you?

For decades, SV venture capital has been tech money, and generally smart tech money (I don't like Thiel, but the man is absolutely the smartest of the PayPal Mafia set, and his success bears that out). Now, for various reasons (the end of ZIRP, the failure of major tech bets since 2016 or so to pay off, COVID overvaluations), VCs have moved into rent-seeking, particularly on government and military contracts. It's no longer tech money, it's political money, and, compared to traditional prime vendors, it's not clear that it's smart political money. After all, when the political winds turn, possibly as soon as this November, is it a smart strategy to have worked aggressively and incessantly to alienate the party coming into power? For a lot of startups with regulatory, legal, or political exposure risk, getting entangled with that might be more trouble than it's worth.

* There is no other term that suits the mix of open white supremacy and anti-democratic policies -- repealing the 19th Amendement, for example! -- that we see emerging from the PayPal Mafia.

Can he make a profit doing it? If so, then yes, he's probably doing it. You don't become a billionaire by having scruples.

I mean it probably is willing to do unsavory things and that’s the problem. Startups often are pressured by investors to do things to get continued funding in the next round. You’re already taking so much risk, you wouldn’t risk more by being on the bad side of a VC. You have to cooperate with their other portfolio companies - basically all VCs expect this. So yes, merely having Peter Thiel around is a problem.

Remember, customers of Discord are facing a huge risk - that their identity could lead to the being detained or deported. Even if the chance is small they can’t take that risk. This Persona company is unfortunately not going to be acceptable to a rational user because of their affiliation.

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