
Palantir in Talks with Germany, France for Virus-Fighting Tool - doener
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/palantir-in-talks-with-germany-france-for-virus-fighting-tool
======
bandage
As a person that had the opportunity to work with them and their products,
seeing a post like this makes me angry and sad. I personally find the company
extremely incompetent, that hires young postgrade students without any prior
experience to solve big problems for the biggest companies around the world.
How it ends up is technical depts and gigantic costs. Not to mention few shady
things that seems normal for them - full access to their customers business
data and source code. Epidemics should not be a time for business
opportunities. It's not like they have any closed patented solution that will
suddenly solve any problems... It's definitely not a equivalent of openai in
data engineering world. They are just experts in marketing bs.

~~~
troughway
So wait.

Are they the big bad all-present panopticon, or are they incompetent,
inexperienced muppets?

~~~
nabnob
If a platform involves tracking huge amounts of personal data and then making
decisions off of that data, incompetence makes it more dangerous, not less.

LAPD has been using Palantir to track people in poor and working class
neighborhoods in LA - [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-
thiel...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/)

>The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to
identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap
sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the
system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic
offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security
Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to
patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as
possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact,
officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles,
physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and
the officer’s own observations on the subject.

>The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brayne calls the
secondary surveillance network: the web of who is related to, friends with, or
sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn’t suspected
of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within
the same network of associates, says Brayne, who spent two and a half years
embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big-data policing
at Princeton University and who’s now an associate professor at the University
of Texas at Austin. “Anybody who logs into the system can see all these
intimate ties,” she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she
adds, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social
media, foreclosure, and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals,
parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John’s
International Inc. and Pizza Hut LLC.

The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court
documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged.

~~~
tsss
> stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as
> jaywalking or fix-it tickets

So organized targeted harassment of innocent people.

~~~
csb6
Yeah this is some dystopian stuff. Guarantee that people on here will
(rightly) criticize non-Western countries for doing stuff like this, but will
ardently defend Palantir doing similar stuff because they’re “innovative” or a
“tech company”.

------
Prospektor4ever
Worked for them as a Product SWE for 2 years. For the record, I would not
recommend it if you have good alternatives as a SWE.

That being said, I want to give a more nuanced comment because, in my opinion,
crisis require some pragmatism which I find to be surprisingly lacking from
the usually reasonable HN crowd.

I understand why Palantir create this epidermic reaction and in most cases I
would agree that they are justified. There is an issue of sovereignty,
countries should aim be self-sufficient in critical areas like Defense,
Healthcare, Counter-terrorism. It is a shame that it is not the case. Many
Palantir employees are motivated to help their country but concluded that the
most straight-forward path, if they did not want to spend many years in a
bureaucracy hell, was to join a startup/software style company, that would
respect their value-added as young/bright engineers and make some of them (the
majority in commercial works on boring stuff) able to work on those topics.

Yes, compared to many cool tech companies, there is nothing great about their
tech. It's a glorified Spark wrapper with a pretty UI and terrible UX. Nothing
with significant tech depth is built-in house. However, THAT is compared to
cool/good tech companies. Compared to a lot of what big corp and bureaucratic
governments can readily provide TODAY, it's a significant improvement and it
is ready, TODAY. It is also more secure compared to what an in-house gov team
could build, as in, they actually encrypt things and there is no obvious
security flaws. Now is the time to use the tool that can reduce the death
tools without compromising security, tomorrow is the time to ask our politics
to invest in their own technology sector and promote young/bright engineers to
build state-of-the-art data platform that does not involve Palantir.

Why Palantir is doing such action is not to gather data (they do not), or to
earn money (it's likely pro bono) but to establish a relationship with
governments, a trojan horse if you will, so that they can sell their services
to more departments. The pragmatic action would be to accept the help now in
crisis time and leverage their tools and somewhat competent Forward Deployed
Engineer workforce, but decline their expansion when we are past the crisis.

~~~
yters
Also, their big principle is human insight over algorithms and machine
learning. This was derived from experience in Paypal, where human in the loop
approaches worked much better for fraud detection than algorithmic approaches.

------
lalos
In some positive light, 3-4 years ago Google or Facebook would've jumped on
and published a contact tracing app without thinking twice. I wonder what's
going on inside in terms of discussions. Some positive side effect of the tech
slash to step back and think twice of side effects or maybe they've learn to
avoid possible bad PR.

~~~
maps7
How is that positive? They have great engineers, great infrastructure and a
lot of money. It would be great if they could help.

~~~
mellow2020
When everybody acts as if they're already infected, and so is everyone else,
how is this helping?

~~~
maps7
Everybody is not acting like that. I meant help in any way that would benefit
everyone.

~~~
mellow2020
> Everybody is not acting like that.

The vast majority does.

> I meant help in any way that would benefit everyone.

And I'm asking how that would help. So far, every single proponent of
"surveillance because covid" I asked this avoided the question.

It's also pretty incredible how you split hairs about "everybody" in the first
sentence, and then talk about something that will help "everyone" in the
second, without even saying how.

~~~
maps7
> The vast majority does.

How can you say that? The Netherlands still has people going to cafes. The UK
is talking about banning outside exercise. Even if you can point to a figure
saying people are moving less and adhering to their government's guidelines I
don't think it follows that you can say the majority of people are acting like
they are infected.

As for the second part, by definition, if those companies actions benefit
everyone.. it would help. I didn't say and I don't know how they would do
that.

Since this conversation started, it looks like Google has used their great
engineers, great infrastructure and lots of money to publish movement reports.
This might feed into Government decisions and hopefully will be a benefit for
"everyone". Check it out here:
[https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/](https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/)

~~~
mellow2020
> How can you say that? The Netherlands still has people going to cafes.

Because vast majority isn't, certainly not in Germany. I can say that because
I have been experiencing it for _weeks_ now.

> Even if you can point to a figure saying people are moving less and adhering
> to their government's guidelines I don't think it follows that you can say
> the majority of people are acting like they are infected.

Those guidelines to after entail acting like people oneself might be infected.
That's why people are to keep distance from anybody, never ever touch their
face while out and about, and wash their hands thoroughly when they come home
(and I might add, also before they leave home).

> As for the second part, by definition, if those companies actions benefit
> everyone.. it would help.

I ask how surveillance help, and you say "if it helps, it helps by
definition". That is hardly an answer.

Let's say 10% simply don't take it seriously. If they don't keep distance from
anyone out of the 90%, those people will know. In Bavaria, someone already
went to jail for 8 days because of exactly that, for not paying heed despite
repeated warnings.

There is no surveillance necessary for that because -- by definition -- the
only way for those 10% to "secretly mingle" would be with other people of
those 10%. Movement tracking also doesn't tell us anything about if people
cough right at other people or into their elbow, or if they wash their hands
when coming home. Mere distance itself isn't saying all that much.

As for the Google thing: super general, anonymized "where do people move
around how much" is something else entirely than the location data of all
indiviuals.

> _What data is included in the calculationdepends on user settings,
> connectivity, andwhether it meets our privacy threshold. If theprivacy
> threshold isn’t met (when somewhereisn’t busy enough to ensure anonymity)
> wedon’t show a change for the day._

That isn't the kind of surveillance we are talking about, like the kind of
German justice ministry previously rejected, for example.

Information that harms nobody, violates no rights, is 100% anonymous, doesn't
even _have_ to be useful for me to have no problem with the collection of.

Palantir on the other hand "declined to comment", so you give me something
completely different from Google. If what Palantir have in mind is so benign
and useful, why don't they proudly explain it? It's not like CoV19 could
overhear that and adjust, like criminals or terrorists might.

And from a PR perspective, declining to comment is the ONE predictably bad
move here. If they want to help, if they have something helpful to bring to
the table, why aren't they open about it? With something like this, they
should have had their story straight before even anyone asked them, before
they even finalized their offers to those governments. This is nowhere good
enough. That isn't "the second part", that is the main issue.

------
code4tee
Please don’t let this company anywhere near the healthcare system.

~~~
boringg
Second to that - that company feels so sketchy.

~~~
sm2i
They are sketchy:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=palantir+cambridge+analytica](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=palantir+cambridge+analytica)

------
nrki
I wonder who responds positively to Palantir recruiters?

Is the money so good that it is easy to suspend your morals?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controversies)

~~~
ng12
Outside of the minority in the Twittersphere bubble most engineers are
apolitical. Palantir offers the opportunity to work on interesting software
solving interesting problems and that gets them very far.

Defense contractors building bombs and the NSA don't really struggle to hire
engineers, either. Assuming everyone has your same belief system is a critical
mistake.

~~~
fesoliveira
Are you sure about that last point? I remember reading somewhere that U.S.
government agencies were having a hard time hiring tech talent, as they did
not pay as well as Silicon Valley nor had the same growth opportunities.
Moreover, they had issues with the patriotic argument, as many millenials
don't share the same ardent patriotism that previous generations had. It's
been a while since I read that article, so things might have changed and I
might be wrong.

~~~
ng12
My thinking is the former problems -- pay, growth, perks -- are more damaging
to their hiring prospects than the actual work the US gov is doing.

------
bane
I actually really get the general reaction here to Palantir. What I don't get
is why the FOSS community hasn't just done the right thing and produce a
competitor yet. It's not like link analysis [1] with shared backends isn't an
interesting problem and big business producing billions in revenue for various
companies every year.

\- Palantir $6B valuation

\- IBM Analyst Notebook -
[https://www.ibm.com/security/resources/demos/i2-analysts-
not...](https://www.ibm.com/security/resources/demos/i2-analysts-notebook-
demo/)

\- Maltego - made by a company called Paterva with something like 200
employees popular in cyber circles

Where can somebody go and just apt-get gnu-links?

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_analysis)

~~~
medecau
> Where can somebody go and just apt-get gnu-links?

[https://gephi.org/users/install/](https://gephi.org/users/install/)

But it was last updated in 2017 -
[https://github.com/gephi/gephi/wiki/Releases](https://github.com/gephi/gephi/wiki/Releases)

~~~
bane
Gephi (and other graph tools) aren't quite the same thing.

The front-end user interface, and the workflows are different. It's a little
closer to how maybe yED works with dragging and dropping of entities,
connections, groups, but also a robust meta-data system attached to all of
those things + some tools that make bringing in new information from free-text
(or wherever) simple. Then all that stuff should be stored in some kind of
centralized semantic database that any user using that system can search and
find stuff somebody else already put in there. Maybe a document search as well
so you can see what raw documents have been ETL'd.

Then take various attributes off of some of the entities and relationships
(like dates, or geos, or IPs) and builds various ways of looking at,
filtering, and search that stuff quickly.

------
corporateslave5
Little known fact is that peter thiel used palantir analytics to help Donald
trump understand where to campaign.

~~~
gazelle21
Do you have a source?

~~~
corporateslave5
There’s no source, it would never be made public.

------
SSchick
I had a recruiter from them reach out to me and ask if I was interested in
moving back to Germany for a 'hot' work position. I guess that's why.

------
Nekorosu
Goodbye-Civil-Liberties virus.

------
angry_octet
It's a great opportunity for Palantir to do some corona-washing and get their
hooks into EU Govt.

On the plus side, Palantir has a reputation for delivering results. Govt needs
to do location and contact tracking on a mass scale, integrated with the test
regime, and it needs rapid analysis of this data.

Negatives include what they will do for governments post the immediate Corona
crisis. I'm expecting forcible deportation on a mass scale to deal with the
long tail of hard to manage infected populations, and general xenophobia.

------
jacquesm
That's the last company I want to see involved here.

------
Sol-
I sure hope governments will be wise enough to not cooperate with Palantir,
which is the embodiment of the worst excesses of surveillance capitalism.
Managing the spread of the virus is a critical issue and if some surveillance
of the population is required, it necessitates a lot of trust and transparency
on part of the government. Working with Palantir would undermine that from the
start.

In principle, I'd have been open voluntarily to installing such a privacy-
preserving bluetooth contact tracing app (provided it's open source and
auditable). But knowing that Palantir may or may not be involved in analyzing
that data, I'll probably pass.

~~~
nogabebop23
>> ... such a privacy-preserving bluetooth contact tracing app (provided it's
open source and auditable

Hey, whip that for the the world, if you don't mind?

Queue the inevitable deluge of "it's not that big of a project, more than 5
Devs would be a shocking waste, etc." comments...

~~~
colonavilus
Fraunhofer is already field-testing an app based on that concept

------
ur-whale
[https://archive.is/NHJLn](https://archive.is/NHJLn)

------
FrojoS
FYI, they are already working for a while with the police in some German
states (Bundeslaender) [1]. So this is not as big news, as it might seem to
some.

[1] Source: Someone who works for them on that.

------
zzleeper
How is a stupid Java app with clueless consultants going to help against
covid? Or is it Thiel selling yet more snake oil?

~~~
2OEH8eoCRo0
Thiel thinks he is the first to discover that government contracts pay
exorbitantly for software that under delivers.

~~~
starfallg
Inviting a lot of unwanted attention too, given his reputation. This is going
to be interesting.

------
bborud
no. just no.

------
stevespang
Palantir sales pitch:

We can provide you a tracking solution, and after the pandemic is over, you
can continue to use the product to track and spy on all your citizens. What a
perfect way to incorporate our superior technology into your Gov't, all under
the auspices of a public emergency !

------
vkou
This is fantastic news - if you're gambling on governments failing to contain
this virus in a prompt manner.

By the time Palantir ships something that works well, we'll probably be half a
year past having a vaccine.

------
Semaphor
It doesn’t affect me (because I don’t trust my government enough with this
data to use that voluntary service, use of any such things tends to expand
more and more and deleted data hasn’t been deleted), but when I first read
that Palantir is one of the companies being talked to I had to laugh.

------
LatteLazy
I strongly oppose the existence of companies like this and the sorts of mass
surveillance activities that the NSA, GCHQ etc engage in. Having these
programs makes core processes in our society like democracy and trial by jury
uncertain.

But given we have let them in, I am also amazed how little we seem to demand
of them. The NSA should easily be able to track everyone an infected person
has been near. That includes people who have been to places shortly after the
infected person was there.

So why aren't they doing that? The marginal cost to our society is nothing and
this epidemic is already worse than all the terrorism ever in most western
nations. These organisations are not just dangerous, they're dangerous and so
far totally useless.

