Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.

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• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  People apparently don’t know about the NSA Utah Datacenter.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

  Been a thing for over a decade, unimaginable total storage size, and they literally archive everything.

  This place had between 3 and 12 exabytes of storage capacity, in 2013.

  1 exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

  How big was your pc/laptop hard drive in 2013?

  Maybe… 250 gigs to 2 teras, something like that?

  This data center could now easily be in the yottabyte range ( millions of exabytes ), maybe even ronnabytes ( billions of exabytes ).

  rankred.com/largest-data-centers-in-the-world/

  6th largest data center in the world by physical size, and it is the only one on this list explictly designated for ‘national security’.

  The NSA has taps on every single major trunk line going in or out of the US, they coordinate with every major ISP, every major software provider, data center operator.

  They have so much archived data that their actual problem is figuring out how to search through it efficiently… and that is a big thing that Palantir does.

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  • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I came here to make this comment less cogently. You have it exactly.

    Now, does it violate US law and multiple Executive Orders to search the database to get dirt on US Citizens and use it against their election campaign? Yes. Yes it does. But this administration thinks laws are for sissies.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      And this was always the problem of building the panopticon, everyone justified doing it by saying ‘well, its fine so long as the good guys are in charge.’

      This is why the panopticon system is destroyed by Lucius Fox after using it to find the Joker in the Dark Knight.

      The system itself is too dangerous to be allowed to exist in a world of flawed humans, and it will eventually be wielded by those least morally qualified to wield it.

      Fuck, this is also basically analagous to the Lord of the Rings… Frodo is the hero for destroying the One Ring, not wielding, because it literally corrupts you.

      God damnit.

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    • socsa@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m still a bit skeptical Palantir would expose this capability over a Senate race which hasn’t even gotten through primaries. I haven’t looked into it that much, but I think it’s far more likely there’s something on the accouny which makes it easy to identify, and someone this dude knows figured it out before he deleted that account.

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    • uncrme@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Opposition research isn’t really illegal, there’s no confirmation that anything from Palantir was actually used, and it’s trivially easy for any layperson to view deleted reddit comments-- to be perfectly honest in this specific case I just don’t think there was anything really untoward

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  • Dragonstaff@leminal.space ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    When people were up in arms about China getting data from TikTok, I wondered if they had any idea of what the NSA does.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      When that was going on, the whole time I was saying that if we ban Tiktok for data security reasons, we should ban Facebook and Instagram for exactly the same reason, and yes, we should ban basically all social media at this point, its all a perfect spying machine, one you get addicted to, beyond hiding in plain sight…

      Of course, that’s extremely unlikely to happen… but it is an actually consistent position.

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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yes I too can use web.archive.org

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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Sure, but it’s also very likely that reddit is still retaining all posts even “deleted” ones in their database. I can go look at the profiles of people who haven’t used their accounts in 12 years. I can use Arctic Shift to view post people have deleted… even from deleted accounts. All the data is still there. That’s why a few years ago when people were deleting accounts it was widely suggested to edit every comment into gibberish before deletion, so the final edit in the database would be worthless. I remember when there were extension tools to do it like NukeReddit that changed everything to gibberish and then deleted it for you all automatically.

    Anyway, I wouldn’t past that fucking pile of shit Steve Huffman to just be passing it off to Palantir because he’s such a little bitch.

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    • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      i’m glad to have deleted my account that way before it was cool. fuck reddit.

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    • saimen@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I mean it’s still the internet and we always knew it’s impossible to really delete something from the Internet. There could be someone somewhere who archives all of reddit with all the edits, just because they can.

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  • Xanthrax@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I don’t think people realize that your user information is automatically documented on a not-so regular basis. (For the web archive crawler)

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    • ghosthacked@lemmy.wtf ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I follow the lesser evil approach. I’m further away socially, culturally, and politically from the Chinese so all my tech is Chinese. Them having my data is less dangerous to me than just letting the redneck reich get it.

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• Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Like, they’ve been able to do this for 25 odd years.

  There were gov data centers with thousands of petabytes when I was in college. Prism had the gov archiving every phone call and all internet traffic back in '08…

  This is not news.

  As soon as the quantum cryptography tech gets there, they’ll start decrypting the signal and matrix chats you had yesterday.

  Privacy is illusory and temporary.

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  • DSN9@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The stasi government would never use my data against me. I’ve got nothing to hide. Hey I think I’ll go buy this doadd for no reason at all no subliminal advertising

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  • reddifuge@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The US governmentnis temporary.

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• Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  There are dedicated tools, called Social Listening tools that do just these. Some examples are Brandwatch, Sprinklr, Talkwalker and Meltwater.

  Not just Palantrmir, anyone and everyone is using these tools. From consumer companies to investment banks to your favourite content creator is using some kind of social listening to stay on top of trends and understand how you behave.

  Reddit and Twitter are two social platforms that provide the most data openly and freely, and in reddit’s case you can get a lot of historical data without extra cost.

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  • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Why are you doing evil work…? Like… Why develop these tools that will so obviously be used to worsen our lives?

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    • False@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Gotta eat

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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’ve been working mostly on the analysis side of things, currently I do this for a consumer goods company.

      And yes I do it to make a living. Got hired as an analyst in this field out of MBA and stayed in this. Also being chronically online and familiar with social networks helped.

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  • QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Could you stop enabling the police state, please?

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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wish lmao. But there are tons of data companies selling all kinds of data on people to whoever will pay them for it. Me working for identifying trends or what flavour of green tea is popular are less harmful use cases.

      What we need is regulation to reign in big tech. These API licenses are expensive and I suspect is a big reason why Reddit ended free data sharing (which led to death of third party reddit clients).

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    ‘Social Listening’ is uh, one way to brand ‘corporate surveillance panopticon’, I guess hahah!

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  • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    go on, tell us more

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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      There isn’t much to tell. We gather conversations and analyse it to understand consumer behaviour, trends, campaign performance etc.

      If you don’t want your data showing up in social listening tools, make your social accounts as private as possible.

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• dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  As a software engineer I was a little shocked when I learned our company treats “Delete” buttons as a means to toggle Archived = 1 in the DB. Nothing is actually deleted. Sure we will anonymise the data after a certain time to be GDPR compliant but it would be trivial I guess to actually link that back to people.

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  • ranzispa@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’m pretty sure GDPR requires websites to abide to user requests to delete their data. You may wish to review that with your company.

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    • SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The GDPR applies to data pertaining to an identifiable person. Anonymised data is more or less equivalent to deleted data as far as the regulation is concerned. Source: I was a DPO for 5 years.

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    • viking@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The requirement exists unless the company is under legal obligation to retain something. I had one case where I requested a GDPR data dump followed by a full deletion, and apparently whoever executed the request deleted first and then processed the dump, so I was able to see that what they did was change my email address from username@mail.tld to username#mail.tld@company.tld - meaning that login attempts, password resets etc. would clearly fail, and a further attempt to request my data revolving around my email address would be unsuccessful, but ultimately all my data was still accessible somewhere. Whether they’d then proceed to delete it after the retention period, who knows. I intended to follow up but forgot…

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    • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The org i used to work for had to develop a special process to delete user data upon request, it was not an easy process in dynamics365

      if you want something deleted you best destroy the hard disk yourself lol

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      There’s no independent audit for GDPR compliance so the only way to know would be if someone whistleblows. There are also so many loopholes that allows to keep the data like “to prevent further abuse” or “some legal reason”.

      So if reddit bans your account they can keep all data and you can’t do anything about it even with GDPR.

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  • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    My current workplace doesn’t have for foresight to do that. Delete fully deletes immediately and without confirmation. Oh and the backups have been broken for years

    On the upside, recent changes in leadership and on the team made it so we finally have the political will and talent in the right places to actually put effort into fixing backups but they have a lot of technical debt to sift through in fixing the last folks’ mistakes and oversights

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  • Alaknar@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s basically how deleting data from a hard drive works too.

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    • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Not quite, deletion from a hard drive also unflags the space the data was located at as being in use, so it will be overwritten eventually so long as the drive continues to have things written to it. Simply flagging something as being archived means that information will remain on the server indefinitely, the exact opposite of what is intended by a delete button.

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  • beejboytyson@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Psh I’m surprised you’re surprised. The only way to really get rid of data is microwave or magnet, no?

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    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I guess I’m naive and believe people would be honest.

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    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      drill bit*

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  • Scolding7300@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It’d work if it was encrypted and you tgrew away the encryption key on delete

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• WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Don’t just be made at palantir.

  The American government funded palantir.

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• eve@evecodes.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  What’s posted to the internet, STAYS on the internet. Forever. Stay safe friens

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• NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Remimds me of when everyone was deleting their posts around the API blackout and suddenly the next day it was like Reddit did a restore from checkpoint and all of the edited posts and deleted posts came right back. I for one had to run the script that replaced then delete my posts twice, but that’s besides the point.

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  • dontpanic@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Same, but then a bunch of mine popped up again sometime in the last few months. Not exactly sure when, and it wasn’t all of them.

    I didn’t run the replace script tho, I wish I would’ve.

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    • PDFuego@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Did they actually come back or did a bunch of comments not show up in your profile because the subs were private so they didn’t get deleted, then they reappeared when the subs reopened? I thought some of mine were restored too, but it was a combination of that and the tool I used only hitting the most recent 1000.

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    • couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Indeed, replacing the posts with irrelevant jibberish was the way

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  • buttnugget@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    What script is this?

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    • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I used this in the past, not sure itll still work, it worked with old.reddit a few years back

      greasyfork.org/en/scripts/…/code

      there’s otherones that edit comments as opposed to deleting them, either way reddit keeps a copy, just fyi

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• shaggyb@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s like none of you have heard of Edward Snowden.

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It hasn’t been on tiktok lately, so, correct, they have not.

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  • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That traitorous cunt who is the reason russia got so much influence in the US 2016 elections? Never heard of him.

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• TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Pretty sure they also have access to banned Reddit accounts whose users can no longer access their history to know what they will be judged and profiled for, too.

  Just assume every social network either allows this directly or enables a third party to do it, Lemmy specially.

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  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Lemmy is explicitly public. I don’t think that’s much of a stretch.

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• scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Fuckers should help me restore my old academic portfolio then. Might as well put living in a dystopian surveillance state to helpful use.

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  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It seems like these sorts of things can be used against you, but whenever it might actually benefit you they always come up short.

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    • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I was screaming this when COVID first hit.

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• KeenFlame@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It was forensics. They used forensics. Ai did not help, probably got a bit in the way even. You can do these things with data. We told you several times

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• ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Oh great the second I become president my DeviantArt is getting leaked

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• unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Literally nothing points to Palantir so far according to that post, so your title is just misinformation…

  Sources claim that […] tools, POSSIBLY including Palantir or similar […] MAY have been used
  Everyone from the sources to the poster are just guessing and speculating.

  I dont doubt that its real, but at this point its just made up nonsense to claim it like this.

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  • boatswain@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ah, but “Planter” and “Palantir” have most of the same letters!

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  • socsa@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Agreed, this would be a really weird way for a state threat actor to reveal an otherwise pretty sensitive capability. I assume there’s something on the account which clearly links him to it and someone he knows recently remembered they know his old account name.

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  In October 2025, various news outlets reported on past Reddit posts by Platner between 2013 and 2021 in which he called himself a “communist”, declared that “all” cops are “bastards”, and agreed with a post describing White people as “racist and stupid”.[36] In a 2013 Reddit discussion about anti-rape underwear, Platner commented that people worried about assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to”.[37] He also referenced political violence in multiple posts; in 2018, he wrote: “Fight until you get tired of fighting with words and then fight with signs, and fists, and guns if need be.” Platner also said that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice” and urged readers to "Get Armed, Get Organized. The Other Side Sure As Hell Is

  Based?

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  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Nothing here that makes mass surveillance off all deleted accounts justified.

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  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Depends - was the assault comment directed at assailants or victims?

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    • TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I read that wrong. He was talking about victims. The comments are from 2013.

      He also claims then ‘he was at his lowest point in life after 4 tours of Iraq, dealing with PTSD and didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about’.

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  • socsa@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Well, except for the rape shit. That is pretty jarring.

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  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Nothing based about overt misogyny… Not to mention the nazi tattoo.

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• TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’m sure Palantir would help Democrats find stuff on NAZIs … right ? Right ?

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  • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The guy in the photo with the nazi tattoo is a democrat lol

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• tired_n_bored@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Palantir is an evil company.

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  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This was pretty evident the second they named their company over the tool used by The Dark Lord Sauron and Saruman to spy on the actions of others from Lord of the Rings.

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• PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Yup, data archival. Now imagine this future: right now, encrypted data transfers may be wire-tapped and stored. When quantum computers are available, all that traffic will be decryptable. This includes pretty much all general HTTPS traffic since TLS mostly uses ECDHE for key exchange which isn’t quantum secure.
  I bet nation state actors are recording everything they can.

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  • pool_spray_098@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Damn, dude… that’s insane and I’m surprised it’s never occurred to me.

    I’ve had the realization before as I realize that maybe my password database will eventually be easily cracked… but there’s no reason it cannot apply to data in transit as well, as long as someone is recording it.

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• nandeEbisu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You don’t need AI for this, just a ton of money for storage and either tolerance for a slow query (like 15-20 minutes) or an engineer who knows what they’re doing in search.

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• sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  For as long as Reddit has been available there have been places that would scrape it and mirror deleted/edited comments. I don’t remember what any of them are so people would use them all the time to figure out what someone said before they were banned.

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• douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Once you put anything on the public internet these days, it will be harvest by corporations and used against you eventually

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• betanumerus@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Sure. As far as I can tell Palantir sells the software that police, ICE and the military use to Face ID suspects, including “aliens” and Osama Bin Laden (way back when that happened).

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• bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  “Deleted”

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• moderatecentrist@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  For some time now, I have written stuff on the internet under the assumption that one day, my identity will be publicly tied to everything I wrote. Surely in the future it will be easy to give an example of my writing to an AI bot, perhaps combined with some facts about my life, and the bot would be able to find anonymous posts that were likely written by me, across the internet.

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• CovfefeKills@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  So like internet archive? oooo spooky

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• Angelevo@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Q. uell. Sur… prise ~

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• kingofras@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Peter Thiel knows about the anti christ

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• Tempus_Fugit@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This should come as no surprise. We all knew they were storing everything away in data centers for decades now. Once AI hit the scene it was over. I knew right at that moment they would use it to parse all that information. That’s why I stopped using social media in a way that could be used to identify my more violent and anarchistic takes. I’m sure I could still be found out, but I’ll not be making it easy for the bastards. Fuck Republicans for fear mongering all of this for my entire life and now cheering for it to be used against their perceived enemies, traitorous cocksuckers.

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• AlexLost@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What’s stopping them from lying about this? They lie about literally everything, why should anyone believe them about anything at all?

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• Ironfist79@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Anything ever posted online can be archived and searched later. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to cross reference publicly available sources along with subpoenaed data.

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