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

Comments

• zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That’s not Palantir doing it. If you put the data in a MariaDB, you can access it, too. Is not MariaDB the culprit, or the one distributing the data?

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• Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  At one point it was possible to download every reddit comment ever. I think it was around 10 years ago I had a copy of that. I can’t remember if it was from reddit directly or from some third party with scrapers. I recall the dataset being free… but it might have been free for me because I had an academic justification? Really don’t recall.

  Anyways, point being that you’re delusional if you think anything you post online ever goes away. Secondly, you can be much less than palentir and have “deleted reddit account comments”. Anyone can get them.

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• Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Once upon a time, we understood that “putting something online” meant releasing it to the public in perpetuity. Any claim otherwise was gaslighting.

  Facebook, et al, have somehow managed to convince people that privacy is something you can get back after they’ve coerced you to give it up.

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  • ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It doesn’t help that people don’t actually care about privacy. The only people who think it’s an issue are the ones looking at weird porn or buying drugs, and the tiny margin of people who actually understand that your personal information can be weaponized years later.

    For the large swath of Liberal America, it’s just a word. They install Alexa in their rooms, they carry their phones everywhere, they post their whole lives on social media. They don’t feel any tangible risk to any of it, so it falls to the lowest priority to worry about, like heart disease and mental health.

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• Tempus_Fugit@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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• TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• anachronist@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Also this is being orchestrated by the DSCC showing that the Democrats still have power and deep state ties, they just use them against left/anti-zionists.

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• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • Dragonstaff@leminal.space ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • uncrme@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • socsa@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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• guy@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Don’t you guys have NSA? Just have a contact there and…

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• sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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• Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What I find more concerning is, how did they get his reddit username?

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  • altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The obvious strong link is reddit+email. Someone could have got into his personal, probably old mailbox, where original registration letters (with r/handle) and notifications still are. I find it more probable, but since government is under MAGA, they could’ve used some way to ask Huffman if some account matches the mail address.

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    • socsa@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This is why I resisted attaching emails to reddit accounts for years. Recently subs have started soft banning users without registered emails though, so I started just using throwaways.

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• Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • QuoVadisHomines@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Could you stop enabling the police state, please?

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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    go on, tell us more

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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • Saarth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • False@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Gotta eat

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• unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • socsa@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • boatswain@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• kingofras@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Peter Thiel knows about the anti christ

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  • Formfiller@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

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• shaggyb@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • CovfefeKills@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• Xanthrax@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lmao. Waybackmachine

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • socsa@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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• LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yes I too can use web.archive.org

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  • Xanthrax@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • saimen@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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