alt Hacker NewsPalantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals
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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.
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?
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.
Surprised that YCombinator threads are misunderstanding palantir, of all forums…
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.