I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016, when he started being open about his support for Trump. Perhaps he was operating with more knowledge than available to the general public and national pollsters? I wonder how involved he was with CA for the purpose of the election. His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting in light of all this.<p>I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.
And CA was introduced to Palantir by none other than Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of one Eric Schmidt. It’s turtles all the way down, and anyone who thinks their private data is not being abused elsewhere (wink, wink) needs to perhaps think again.
If Cambridge Analytica violated (a) the CFAA [1] or (b) federal election law [2][3], Palantir could be--best case--dragged into years of lawsuits. If they knew about said violations and did nothing, it could be more serious. Either way, I'd write off the near-term odds of their managing an IPO.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Criminal_offenses_under_the_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#C...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/26/cambridge-analytica-investigation-request-484866" rel="nofollow">https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/26/cambridge-analytic...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-calls-for-fec-investigation-of-cambridge-analyticas-reported-illegal-interference-in-american-elections" rel="nofollow">https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blu...</a>
I wonder if anyone is really surprised by this.<p>It became pretty clear right after Trump won the election (as early as December 2016) during this meeting: <a href="https://youtu.be/oX_9yD2lN2g" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/oX_9yD2lN2g</a>. Trump met with 13 tech company giants and somehow Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir) is at the table. The rest of the executives are from companies with market caps well into the hundreds of billions.
FWIW Palantir gave a pretty ironclad denial on the record for this article:<p>> A spokesperson for Palantir told CNBC the company has never had a relationship with Cambridge Analytica and has never worked on any Cambridge Analytica data. Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for comment.
The sad part isn't that CA mined the data or that Palantir helped build models, it's that those 50 million people believed in the campaigns they were fed. If a few powerful people can influence the masses to achieve their objectives, what good is democracy bringing to the table? More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?
Ha. I was just talking here the other day about how my friend at Facebook would always say that Palantir has even more data, including just about everything from Facebook, and a commenter responded that they couldn't see how Palantir would actually be able to scrape up Facebook's data...
Perhaps companies contracted to provide data processing services should be required to check that the source of the data was legitimate and within the allowances of data protection regulations.<p>Just like AML rules, where companies processing large amounts of funds have to check the source of the funds to ensure they were obtained legitimately.
What I want to know: who were the ones who took that data and did the ad buys, picked/wrote the rage-bait content, etc? I don't think I have seen that detail anywhere. Did I miss it somewhere?<p>(follow the money, etc)<p>Psychographic profiles/privacy issues aside, to me it's the tension-stoking-Willie-Horton-propaganda tactics that deserve public scorn, if, alas, not prosecution. Unless it was (also) Russia.
This title really should be updated. Even the title in the linked story says that this is “alleged,” and there is zero evidence in the story other than the say-so of one media-hungry individual. Further, Palantir has issued a flat out denial, yet this headline appears on HN as a statement of fact.
Article leaves out that Palantir's co-founder Thiel is on the board of Facebook, and donated to a PAC which funded the Cambridge Analytica campaign.
Not at all surprised that Palantir sees itself as being more powerful than national governments.<p>The upside is that Palantir and Mr. Thiel will suffer the same fate as most business associates of Mr. Trump, out of the money and with a permanently tainted reputation to boot.
Is anyone getting the sense that Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook aligned on a rather coherent political axis, with Google and Apple staking out an opposing axis, and Amazon is staking out a sort of arms-dealer neutrality?
And Palantir worked with HBGary to infiltrate and destroy Wikileaks in 2010:<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-apology-2011-2" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-apology-20...</a>
"Mr. Wylie said that he and Mr. Nix visited Palantir's London office on Soho Square. One side was set up like a high-security office, Mr. Wylie said, with separate rooms that could be entered only with particular codes. The other side, he said, was like a tech start-up - "weird inspirational quotes and stuff on the wall and free beer, and there's a Ping-Pong table.""<p>Source:
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-pa...</a>
Thiel also gave money to a PAC than then paid Cambridge Analytica:<p><a href="https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambridge-analytica/" rel="nofollow">https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid...</a>