A Boring Dystopia

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

https://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 ).

https://www.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 US-based 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, that was kinda their whole intitial... thing, as a company.

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.

Don't just be mad at palantir.

The American government funded palantir.

Palantir couldn't exist without the helping hand of the American government.

The time to give a fuck was long before Snowden made his leaks.

All the dystopian stuff people fear the government will do is already being done by a framework of companies funded by our government.

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

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

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

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.

Yes I too can use web.archive.org

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

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.

Palantir is an evil company.

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.

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.

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).

Once you scan your face data and post it online, you can assume security agencies (Palantir clients) load it into Palantir software to complete your profile. Privacy is dead.

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

Q. uell. Sur....... prise ~

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

Not just Palantir, 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.

Your favourite candle brand, and your favourite outdoor clothing company and protein shake company is part of your favourite reddit community listening to what you're talking about. They know if you like energy drinks, you might light heavily scented bath soaps too.

Deleted posts show up on these platforms quite often but when you click on them to go to reddit or twitter you'll get a not found or deleted page.

PS: I've been working in social listening for last 8 years.

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.

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.