Meet Palantir: A Surveillance Company Founded By Trump Crony Thiel To Track COVID-19

[turbinetree]

Politics 4/25/20 2:01pm Read time: 3 minutes

As if we don’t have enough to worry about from Trump and the coronavirus already, there’s a data-mining company called Palantir, founded by gazillionaire crony Peter Thiel, digging up and providing information about us and COVID-19 to the federal government.

By NewsHound Ellen

Reporter Spencer Ackerman appeared on AM Joy today to expand on a frightening article in The Daily Beast about Thiel and Palantir’s involvement in the creation of a government coronavirus data platform.

A top donor to conservative causes and the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel was, according to The Wall Street Journal, instrumental in pushing the social networking giant to allow politicians to lie in advertisements on the platform. It’s a policy that many outside observers believe will help the Trump campaign—which Thiel has again pledged to support.

Palantir, which Thiel helped found—and still retains a sizeable stake in — has watched its already-lucrative government business skyrocket in the Trump era.

Now, as Ackerman explained to host Joy Reid, Palantir is integrating data for the Department of Health and Human Services “from a staggering amount of data sets from around the country.”

https://crooksandliars.com/2020/04/meet-palantir-surveillance-company-founded

I did not sign a consent agreement to this right wing libertarian Thiel................fuck this shit...........

[SheltieLover]

1. K&R

No. Just no. This shit needs to stop. 🤬

TY for posting.

[turbinetree]

2. Wado---------------thank you

[SheltieLover]

3. Just imagine the possibilities...

Voting day surveilance in Dem districts. What could go wrong? 🤬

[turbinetree]

4. Yepper spot on....................

a lot...................

[SheltieLover]

6. This shit needs to stop. Right. Now!

Don't you just love how in our fsces they are since none of them are being prosecuted under Barr?

[dustyscamp]

5. Feanor says FU to Thiel

[niyad]

7. KNRfor visibility

[Aristus]

8. 'Palantir'. Jesus, hasn't Tolken's writing been misused enough already?

[turbinetree]

9. That's right I had forgotten that it was in the Fellowship of the Ring..............

and yes they have been misused...............enough already...........

[crickets]

10. Palantir 'data integration' sounds disturbing to say the least. What about HIPAA?

Another article that discusses Palantir, though not in this quote -

Should you fear government surveillance in the coronavirus era?

The larger threat to Americans' privacy, however, may be rooted less in the current crisis, than in the country's lack of a comprehensive laws that protect data in the first place, according to Bowman. The U.S., he notes, has a hodgepodge of laws when it comes to health and children's privacy, which creates many gaps. It's also unclear what laws apply to which companies. For instance, there's uncertainty whether the federal health privacy law, HIPAA, applies to the likes of Google while, when it comes to data collection, phone carriers are subject to more stringent rules than tech companies.

The upshot is what the U.S. may need most is not specific measures to prevent misuse of health data during the current outbreak, but federal legislation that creates overarching privacy regulation such as already exists in places like Canada and Europe. Ironically, Congress was negotiating the details of such a law before the pandemic broke out and legislators became consumed with the crisis. Now, champions of the law, including Rep. DelBene, are pushing to ensure the project doesn't fall between the cracks.

Says Rep. DelBene, who is pushing for privacy even as her home state of Washington faces some of the heaviest toll from the outbreak: "We need to continue to realize what a critical priority this is. Other parts of the world are taking this seriously. We need a federal standard."

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. As in Europe, we need a law that states our data is ours.