Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. When I was at Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.
Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.
Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.
You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it?
1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make
> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations.
Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.
For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).
> Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.
What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
We don't know how many victims there were of the Nazi atrocities, but I feel pretty confident going by what you could call their qualitative, "labels." In fact, I don't think the true casualty numbers are known for most wars and genocides. Utilitarian calculations are limited to situations with controlled conditions and scientific openness, like when charities try to keep track of their cost effectiveness.
This is definitely a well thought out comment that's worth replying to.
If you're asking if every citizen living in Germany from 1933-1945 did only evil things, the answer is obviously no. If you're asking if every person who was ever in the nazi party was a uniquely evil human being, also no.
> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?
Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization.
For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
> For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy.
This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.
And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.
Everything being "not unambiguously good" doesn't mean it's all equivalent. Even if we can't quantify things perfectly, we can still make reasonable comparisons. I don't know precisely how much an adult tiger or raccoon weighs, I'm still pretty sure about which one is heavier.
That’s what I’m saying. The moral labeling game causes black and white thinking.
You are not a moral person for working at an elementary school instead of a car manufacturer. The question is actually what you do, what talents you have, and how that affects other people.
I don't disagree with you that working for a certain industry isn't sufficient to make someone moral, but I do think that working for certain industries is sufficient to make someone _immoral_. I can't conclude you're moral or immoral just from the fact that you work at an elementary school, but if you making your living from scamming innocent people or something, I don't think I need to know what specific skills you have to decide that you're immoral. At some point far enough along in the spectrum, things stop being ambiguous, and everyone will draw the line differently. The parent commenter considers adtech to be on the wrong side of that line, and although I think reasonable people might disagree, I don't think their perspective is unreasonable either.
I work in an industry with a small handful of software companies, so not going to out myself. But the 13 year old edgelord I was wouldn't be able to criticize what I'm working on now, so I can rest easy here.
Did you get confused by two opposing morally charged labels in the same sentence?
“And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?”
On the other hand, if everybody all collectively agreed not to work on adtech, there would be no adtech (or adtech companies). Our decisions don't exist in a vacuum with everyone else's choices being static.
I don’t understand. Would the world be more moral if the ads were only published in newspapers? Or are you expending this to say if I was truly moral I would not participate in the buying and selling of goods?
Computer ads aren’t evil, surveillance, spam, and scams are evil.
Computer ads may not inherently be evil in a vacuum, but pretty much all adtech in practice is at best willfully ignorant about participating in some combination of surveillance, spam, and/or scamming. There certainly can be scams and spam in newspaper ads, but they're definitely not nearly as invasive, and I'm not even sure what it would mean to talk about surveillance with respect to newspaper ads.
I honestly don't have a clue how what I said could be interpreted as arguing that all buying and selling is immoral, so I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing that line of thinking.
> What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in?
The impact is exactly what is pointed out in the article - someone in the local police department could use it against me.
> Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
No, because that doesn't affect me.
See, you keep clinging to some morality claim, and I am explicitly not. I am saying that there is potentially a direct impact on abuse against me personally.
If you were interested in reducing harm you would ask this kind of question. If you are just interested in avoiding things that have a bad image, then you wont.
The logical conclusion of this viewpoint is that you must fully withdraw from society and live off the land as a hermit, lest you accidentally do something that has a negative externality.
This is such a dodge, whataboutism at its finest. “You have a moral critique of a thing? Well that’s weird because you clearly don’t have a detailed moral analysis of literally everything else you do in life, therefore this critique is just because of negative branding”.
“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.
No. I’m arguing that morality is determined by what you do (help or harm), not what industry your employer is in and how the media perceives that market segment.
This shallow label analysis (oil bad, palantir bad, non profit good) is not “morality”, it’s politics.
Most people espouse a utilitarian ethics, but rely on media and social cues rather than harm to determine their choices.
If your job is to pour barrels of oil into the ocean, I think that’s worth evaluating. If your job is to do accounting for the oil company, I’m not sure you’re causing harm relative to other accounting employment.
It’s also valid to decide image is important to you, but don’t tell me it’s because you are a Good Samaritan.
In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell.
In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.
I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit.
Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.
I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:
working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics
we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.
I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?
"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"
Which is why we’ve partnered with CleaverCo, to synergistically deliver high-performance vertically integrated scalable dismemberment solutions for the enterprise and beyond.
The tools don't collect data, but without the tool, the data is almost useless, as it takes a lot of effort to get anywhere.
If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down
You weren't abused. You were just talked to in a way that caused an elevated emotional response.
That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.
> That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument.
The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc.
But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead.
You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it.
In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.
> The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)?
I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
That's because the bill of rights enumerates some of the rights people have against the government rather than the other way around. But that doesn't really get you out of it
Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem.
The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off.
Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads.
Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff.
And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.
I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.