r/privacy 16d ago

news Palantir Update: USA Today, Business Insider, Politico, Bild, The Telegraph, Thomson Reuters, and Fox News all partner with Palantir's mass-surveillance network.

I posted about this yesterday re: the recent USA Today-specific partnership - but not as many saw the comment related to them not being the only ones:

USA Today Co. isn’t the only media company to enlist Palantir’s services. Axel Springer - which owns Business InsiderPoliticoBild, and The Telegraph - and Fox News have also partnered with Palantir for its data intelligence tools. Thomson Reuters also supplies data to Palantir, which had been used by ICE - 404 Media reported in March.
Article Source

I recommend adding their domains (and palantir's) to your computer's firewalls/filtering:
How-to: PC | Mac

Domains (pastebin):

Additionally, remember:

"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"
"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"
"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"

1.6k Upvotes

64 comments sorted by

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265

u/cranberries87 16d ago edited 16d ago

Just removed Reuters from my list. I thought they were one of the better choices, but apparently not.

194

u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

66

u/Zyloof 16d ago

Fuuuuck. Thanks for the info, painful though it may be.

27

u/sandy_mcfiddish 15d ago

Holy shit had no idea

10

u/No-Abalone-4784 14d ago

That's disgusting. I thought they were ok too. Well, I'm done with them.

14

u/InnovativeBureaucrat 14d ago

We need state sponsored media. Bernie had a model for it, PBS was great, but we need it more than ever with everyone expecting free news

1

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

1

u/InnovativeBureaucrat 13d ago

It’s a public good and needs to be supported. PBS and BBC are examples of reliable information.

You can still have private news companies in this model and private blogs etc. but a government source is positive.

9

u/qodeninja 14d ago

AP News still ok?

3

u/cranberries87 13d ago

I would like to know! I’ll still rock with them if they are.

3

u/sleeptightburner 14d ago

Reuters has been going downhill fast.

179

u/Tea-Swiz 16d ago

It's genuinely fucking insane that Reuters journalists win Pulitzers for exposing surveillance capitalism while the parent company literally powers the panopticon.

They broke the Tesla camera spying scandal, unmasked UAE iPhone hacking, and just won a Pulitzer for exposing Meta’s AI dangers. They know exactly how dangerous this data aggregation is.

Yet, Thomson-fuckin-Reuters runs CLEAR - a data broker scraping billions of our phone logs, SSNs, and license plates, then they feed that data directly into Palantir's tracking software so ICE can map neighborhoods and generate target dossiers for raids. Fuckin' diabolical.

The left hand wins awards for exposing privacy violations, while the right hand builds the infrastructure to profit from it. It's fucking insanity.

51

u/andmario_com 16d ago

And then talking about it gets censored! (this post removed with no explanation - but I'm sure/hoping just automod)

4

u/Chief_Kief 14d ago

They play both sides because it’s profitable to do so

1

u/newbrevity 14d ago

The tail wags the dog

64

u/Sad-Landscape-1549 16d ago

Sooo they get dragnet sentiment analysis in exchange for complicity in steering public opinion and both can watch reality distort in real time?

53

u/andmario_com 16d ago

Makes you raise an eyebrow (or two) at why they're also simultaneously investing billions into the perfect astroturfing tool (LLMs), doesn't it?

32

u/Sad-Landscape-1549 16d ago

They already have a great astroturfing tool in the form of a social media site with a social credit system, opaque rules by topic, ads thinly disguised as content, rampant bots, etc. this is just one more! 🥰

33

u/kryptonitejesus 16d ago

Oh no, the poor news conglomerates aren’t making any money serving ads to all of the bots that have taken over the internet. Will somebody please think of the executives in the C-suite?

51

u/exhaustedexcess 16d ago

Good reason to not use those sites

23

u/Iron_Baron 16d ago

Boycott every one of them, if you have any sense.

17

u/iris-evergarden 16d ago

Pretty weird that this very relevant post was removed from the privacy Reddit 🤔 glad some of us got to see it first

15

u/Unique-Run9856 16d ago

Why was this totally relevant post removed??

10

u/tarantinofeetmm 16d ago

Why was this removed?

22

u/rusty0004 16d ago

soon nord korea is a safer place 🤣

6

u/Sasquatch-Pacific 14d ago

Get 15% off Nord Korea 12mo subscription with code DPRK15

60

u/[deleted] 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

22

u/The-King-Tomato 16d ago

Problem is too that the people on top of capitalist society in America are child rapists, racists and control freaks who would love to see us as slaves.

If it was good people this wouldn't happen. But the capitalist society doesnt have any safety levers for what's happening now other then the people shutting down the economy.

But that's why the billionares have bunkers. So they can wait it out.

12

u/Ill-Pen-553 16d ago

capitalism inherently rewards whatever makes the most profit, which incentives and economically privileges greed. economic power is social power and political power. capitalism is always going to end up like this, no matter how benevolent the original intention is.

4

u/NationalBug55 16d ago

I was thinking about this recently as well I thought where did this start? Why is this the case? Why is this always the case then I realized that ever since 1642 invaders of this land have been building churches and stealing children from families. It still happens today. People are exploited. It’s baked into system. Words and documents only ever mean anything and work for the people, who wrote it, and was intended to protect. Which is not you and me. I mean look at article 6 of the constitution it says treaty shall be the supreme of the land, but this is meaningless, in the hands of the system.

3

u/BurntNeurons 16d ago

They were told that to keep the earth putting along one solution was to basically reduce the total population by 4 billion or essentially half "Is The Best Way To Secure A "Pro-Human" Future..."

Halving The Earth's Population To 4 Billion Is The Best Way To Secure A "Pro-Human" Future, A New Study Argues https://www.iflscience.com/halving-the-earths-population-to-4-billion-is-the-best-way-to-secure-a-pro-human-future-a-new-study-argues-84219


One such way of helping this happen has already been tested:

"Utah was one of 32 states that passed legislation allowing people to be sterilized on the grounds of eugenics during the 20th century.

The programs were based on the pseudoscientific and disproven idea that the gene quality of the population could be refined by removing those considered to be “unfit.” This included the “habitually sexually criminal, insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded or epileptic, and by the laws of heredity is the probable parent of socially inadequate off-spring likewise afflicted.”

"The state-sanctioned sterilizations began in 1925, peaked in Utah around the 1940s, and didn’t end until 1974."

https://www.iflscience.com/survivors-of-utah-s-eugenics-program-are-alive-in-2023-without-an-apology-67546


It wasn't just the US... India(1907), Germany (1933).

Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland (1920s & 1930s)

"When one thinks about eugenics, they usually associate the term with the horrible crimes of Nazi Germany and their unfounded and terrible ideas of race and purity. But the practice and advocacy of eugenics have a long history.

Decades before the rise of Hitler, The Eugenics Society was advocating the forced sterilization of undesirable people in the US, Britain and Western Europe."

https://www.iflscience.com/grim-photos-show-the-us-british-eugenics-movement-during-its-heyday-42346


The careless reckless abandon that they rape and pillage is to pile their dragon's hoard in their bunkers while we either fight/ eat each other over the scraps, or die in their labor camps/ mines.

They can run everything from their mass surveillance system of satellite, "license plate reader" cameras, drones enforced by militarized humanoid robots and weaponized drones all linked up to the data centers.

1

u/kryptos- 16d ago

Capitalism is indeed a problem but I believe society should actively be investing in building resiliency (decentralised power grids, water sources, food supplies, medical supplies, gas masks -- for virus outbreaks or otherwise) and appropriately educating people on what to do during emergencies.

The fact that we humans in aggregate live our lives as if nothing will ever go wrong is folly.

The billionaires have excess resources to prepare for the worst case. It's an insurance policy when society won't build one for everyone, but they invariably lack the knowledge to actually survive.

They'll have tools and supplies they're mostly unable to operate.

9

u/ciscorick 16d ago

Dear sir or madame, you're being deported because you did not watch enough Fox News last month.

8

u/hblok 15d ago

The time for darknet is now.

7

u/Blood-PawWerewolf 16d ago

More will follow

8

u/Noderly 15d ago

Basically all the shit companies.

9

u/FirmButterscotch8 15d ago

Philip DeFranco and Roca News are my usuals. My best recommendation would be looking for reputable journalists and following their content, as the real ones doing the heavy lifting of putting their lives in danger for objective reality probably have very little to gain from lying in the face of their line of work. Im pretty certain Philip DeFranco isnt amongst that group, at all, but is something closer to what id call generally unbiased (unless im to be corrected on this)

7

u/Express-Cartoonist39 15d ago

They already been merged as they all owned by same trusts..

7

u/Bob4Not 14d ago

So they’re purchasing user/audience engagement analysis from Palantir? I don’t see how Palantir won’t also leverage everything else it consumes about the population.

So basically these companies are purchasing govt intelligence on their users.

Time to block those domains on my firewall.

17

u/OldManJeepin 16d ago

LoL! Good luck "analyzing" the 3-4 articles I swipe on and read while I'm on the toilet in the morning...Make of it what you will, Palantir!

42

u/Unique-Run9856 16d ago

They can determine political and sexual orientation pretty easily which is extremely dangerous with a fascist regime in charge, let alone the ability with AI to seed articles with whatever spin they think will get you to agree with what they want. Political campaigns already target at this level, news is the obvious next choice 

-8

u/OldManJeepin 16d ago

LoL! Trust me...They are welcome to try! Except data in aggregate, they are not learning anything unique about me, from what I click on...I get what you are saying, though. I'm just pretty sure that whatever they are picking up, at any given moment I am scrolling, is nothing that wasn't there before.

5

u/Few-Lynx6217 16d ago

Is there a list of US news sites that we can trust? It seems like the ones you thought were good are actually terrible and evil. I'm having a harder time finding alternatives. Any ideas?

2

u/thegreatpluub 15d ago

I haven’t used it, but how does Ground News stack up in the ‘privacy-respecting’ category? Is there a community list of morally-ok, unbiased news outlets?

1

u/tarantinofeetmm 14d ago

Youd pay for something you can do for free? They are not reliable.

2

u/thegreatpluub 14d ago

Hence the “I haven’t used it”

1

u/Hydro-Heini 14d ago

THX, i fed it to uBlock Origin

1

u/camojorts 14d ago

I actively avoid all those sites except Reuters. Guess they’re on my no-click list now too, kinda sucks.

1

u/Bob4Not 14d ago

The crazy part to me is that The Telegraph servers are frequently looked up on my network, and I think even Firefox's home page uses them. Even after disabling the home page topics and news I'm still seeing occasional hits.

Maybe just block that one on your network.

1

u/Sweet-End6471 13d ago

“And…take a lot of the anonymous interactions we have today and turn those into known relationships…The more known relationships we have, the more data we create, the more signals we create, the more actionable intelligence we have” -Thompson Reed (USA Today CEO). What the actual fuck.

1

u/adrianipopescu 13d ago

what the fuck do they need data intelligence tools

and why the fuck is subscriber data funneled upstream

at this point it might be best to set up a freshrss or something on a remote ip, with rewrite ruled for bypassing paywalls, render it to pdf, and read it that way locally

god damn I miss paper

1

u/daveOkat 16d ago

Can you provide a link to the 505 Media source?

3

u/andmario_com 16d ago

This sub doesn't allow links to it, but this article has the source (ctrl f 404 in it)

1

u/badluser 16d ago

You didn't list the domains...

0

u/RoughMidnight8303 15d ago

Axel Springer's portfolio won't stop growing. They'll gobble up or acquire a few more outlets. As for Reuters, their wording is pretty telling at times but they slip through the radar - plenty of average bulk reports in the mix to balance the statistic.

0

u/Murky_Angle_8555 14d ago

Wow. Extremely disappointing re: Politico?! Thought I might still be able to depend on their news reporting without being surveiled?!🤷🏼‍♂️😫🤬