Comment on Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact
melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 day ago
Palantir is one of the most even capitalism companies I have ever seen.
There is nothing evil about palantir as a company or business model. They are a highly skilled big data analytics firm and just ingest clients data and output useful metrics.
The evil is the client(governments) intention to collect and use this kind of data. Which has nothing to do with capitalism and is only happening due to liberalism being on the way out.
Nah fuck them. They black box said analytics, making any kind of audit of the decisions impossible. This is HORRIBLE, especially in the contract of government and health care.
Not true. They absolutely let auditors go through the work especially for big clients like government. There is a ton of 3rd party audits that asses if palantir actually provided value and improvement in their contract.
Nothing is “black box” if you have the money.
You clearly know nothing or feign ignorance about its creator/CEO, Peter Thiel, who is evil, with evil intent, and evil aspirations.
I dont care about some nutcase CEO yapping in vanity interviews. Show me something evil done by the company palantir. The things people are upset at palantir for are things requested by the people voted in to write laws. The criticism should be entirely on them.
This is mental gymnastics on an olympic level.
I guess there was nothing evil about GM and Ford supplying Nazis with car parts (Henry Ford got a ‘golden eagle’ award from Adolf!) before WW2. Nothing evil about IBM supplying them with punch cards to keep track of the Jewish either, right?
The evil there is the Nazi’s so Im not going to talk about “most evil” and point to Ford when the Nazi’s are standing right next to them.
We can easily chain together support to call anyone evil but thats stupid and unproductive. I’ll draw the line at the person committing the evil act being evil. Are people who hold raytheon stock evil? Are people who work for the government under Trump evil? Are the people who made food for Nazi’s evil? Where do you draw your line?
Amazing. If you build and sell tools to commit horrible crimes against humanity, that’s all cool, it’s just good business actually as long as someone else is pushing the button.
A kindergardener has more robust ethics than this.
Palantir could refuse to accept the mandate and the money, but they didn’t. So the governments are evil, and so is Palantir
So palantir analyses pretty sensitive data, for instance health data from NHS. They may not be able to share the data itself but are there any safeguards against them using the knowledge they gain from these analyses to consult health insurance companies for outrageous amounts of money so insurance companies can fuck people even more by grinding stats?
Same goes for them analysing surveillance data. Any safeguards against it actually consulting fascist political parties on results of these analyses so they can more efficiently carry out fear mongering?
Normally id say data protection laws but the administration does not care to prosecute laws.
Palantir says they dont share data between clients and I’m inclined to believe them because there is no evidence they do and it would be a huge break in the norms and most likely drive away a lot of their clients. Their business model is not consulting based on mystery data, its building software pipelines to clean and interpret the clients current data.
Well these kind of companies are great at finding loopholes. Not sharing data and not consulting using your overall understanding of the playing field is different. And in most cases the latter means “refined understanding of statistical analyses” which is what most other companies needing data will be interested in.
I do agree that their main business model is analysing data for clients but that does not mean that they can generate more revenue by other means. It seems like many big tech companies have a facade of a service that they provide but they have a lot of mechanisms behind the service that generates revenue for them. See Facebook, twitter etc whose data/platform has been used countless time to steer political decisions (unfortunately used mostly by right wing organizations).
most likely drive away a lot of their clients. You would think so but today there are still left leaning politicians, academicians etc using twitter, two years after extreme right wing fear and war mongering of Felon Musk. All Palantir needs to do is amass sensitive and critical data across many different fields and consult interested parties (without breaking any of the contracts so they are not liable). It will be ages before they will start losing enough clients that their main business model will become unprofitable. Anyway, by then they will likely have enough money/influence to hop anywhere they want.
I know this is all circumstantial so I will finish by adding one more circumstantial data. Look at the picture below and tell me Palantir will play fair with all the extremely sensitive knowledge it gains across defense, health, energy, transport etc
This is an accurate assessment. Companies will do what they can to make more money, it’s that simple. The fact that the clients choose to use it for evil doesn’t make a difference.
Granted, if their product wasn’t available, then governments would buy it, but still, it’s just another company taking advantage of what their clients want and profiting from it.
Samsung makes shit devices that steal all your data and sell that data for more profit. The same devices are made with planned obsolescence in mind. If you buy Samsung devices that’s on tour, not them.
Companies will do what they can to make more money Yea, including evil shit. Like palantir.
FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m fairly certain it’ll be renamed Cyberdyne at some point soon