Always easier when you can avoid the law and just buy it off the shelf. Itâs fine to do this, we say, because itâs not being done by the government - but if theyâre allowed to turn around and buy it weâre much worse off.
That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.
I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.
The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.
That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.
>A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row.
A private company can 100% do this in many ways. They already do this buy putting up and using their technology in minority areas, for example.
Yeah but these companies are operating hand in glove with govt such that there's no discernible difference between the current system and government just doing it themselves. Ban it outright.
Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.
What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.
Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.
The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.
Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?
We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.
That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.
But that is his point with "or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect"
The company doesn't have that power, but the government can compel companies to provide them with the same data as long as it exists, and then abuse it in the same way as if they had collected it themselves.
What would such a ban look like?
A private company can surely link its own cameras and data to create a private use database of undesirables. Iâm certain that Walmart and friends do exactly this already. Itâs the large scale version of the Polaroids behind the counter.
It can be banned explicitly as a regulation on surveillance cameras. Like:
- The footage must be secured / only stored locally, and can only be used in legal proceedings or liability, and can be stored for maximum 1 (or a different number) year
- It cannot be sold or used to train AI or processed for marketing or other purposes without consent of all involved (in practice impossible).
- And no people cannot "agree" to things by just entering the premises or view
- It is illegal to make decisions based on illegally obtained (as per above) analytics, like refusing entry/membership/service, with a private right of action
wouldnt "Any person found to have implemented a system which violates the rights of people in xyz way will be punished with imrisonment" work ?
Or that the government isn't allowed to purchase anything they'd normally need a warrant for?
So everyone and their mom and all the foreign governments can buy the data, but not your own government? Do you really think this is a sustainable arrangement?
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I would much rather have a democratically elected and constitutionally constrained government than private enterprise with limitless power. It would also be helpful if the âgovernment is badâ people would stop electing the people who seek to sabotage the government.
Facial recognition is not a legitimate private enterprise. It is a complete failure of legislation that it is allowed to exist.
Just like when Verizon sold its customers' precise location history to data brokers who then sold it to law enforcement agencies.[^1] Laundered.
[^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...
That's not how the law works in the US. The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself. This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment, despite the fact that it was a third party that was doing the actual banning at the behest of the government.
The government could legally create its own facial recognition technology if it wanted to. They're not avoiding the law, facial recognition isn't illegal.
That's pretty much how KYC works. The government can't just willy nilly demand papers of everyone going into the bank to open up an account due to the 4th amendment. So they just make the bank do it so it is a "private" act, and then for instance IRS is authorized to do warrantless seizure on the accounts which are now tied to names that were forced to be revealed under KYC laws.
The government doesn't need a warrant to access bank records, as per the US's banking laws. They just need an administrative subpoena, which doesn't have to be signed off by a judge.
This is not and example of the government sidestepping laws through a third party. You just don't like the existing laws, and would prefer to make certain things illegal that are presently legal.
> This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment
It's very strange of you to leave out that the extremely right-wing 5th Circuit's opinion was overturned 6-3 by SCOTUS because "pressuring social media companies to ban content" was a complete fabrication the plaintiffs failed to support whatsoever.
Regardless of the subsequent lifting of the order, it still illustrates that the government cannot make private parties carry out illegal acts on its behalf. If anything, the fact that the circuit's decision was later overturned shows that the courts are erring on the side of restraining the government when they try to make third parties carry out actions that the government cannot do legally.
This is why we should shun the people that build this stuff. If you take a paycheck to enable fascism, you're a bad person and should be unwelcome in polite society.
There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Well, if that's true then employees of the companies that build the tools for all this to happen can also be held responsible, no?
I'm actually an optimist and believe there will come a time whena whole lot of people will deny ever working for Palantir, for Clearview on this and so on.
What you, as a software engineer, help build has an impact on the world. These things couldn't exist if people didn't create and maintain them. I really hope people who work at these companies consider what they're helping to accomplish.
I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.
At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.
Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.
It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.
At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.
At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.
I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.
That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.
However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.
Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.
All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.
> I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
Hannah Arendt coined the term âthe banality of evilâ. Many people think they are just following orders without reflecting on their actions.
> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others.
To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level.
In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated.
I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted?
This is an interesting article [0].
This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics...
> average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure.
I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.
You're trying to find claims that aren't there, they are explicitly saying that "certain people" (which may or may not include the original poster) think that deliberately killing civilians is fine if their government is bad enough. They then go on to rhetorically question if those same "certain people" would find terrorist killings of tech workers who work at companies they don't like justified because they help the US government, even if it's in a purely civilian context.
>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.
Or heroes, if they win.
No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.
And this right here is why Clearview (and others) should have been torn apart back when they first appeared on stage.
I 'member people who warned about something like this having the potential to be abused for/by the government, we were ridiculed at best, and look where we are now, a couple of years later.
"This cannot happen here" should be classified as a logical fallacy.
As stated in many of the comments in my code where some else branch claims this shouldn't be happening
"Tactical Targeting" - you just know someone's PowerPoint presentation used the word "synergy" in it too.
We need a Constitutional amendment that guarantees a complete right to anonymity at every level: financial, vehicular, travel, etc. This means the government must not take any steps to identify a person or link databases identifying people until there has been a documented crime where the person is a suspect.
Only if an anonymous person or their property is caught in a criminal act may the respective identity be investigated. This should be sufficient to ensure justice. Moreover, the evidence corresponding to the criminal act must be subject to a post-hoc judicial review for the justifiability of the conducted investigation.
Unfortunately for us, the day we stopped updating the Constitution is the day it all started going downhill.
That will be wildly unpopular with both parties and most importantly their constituents. I doubt even the libertarian party should they get the president, house and senate could pull it off
Note that the Amendment would apply only to the government, not to private interests. Even so, i could be unpopular among advertisers and data resellers, e.g. Clearview, who sell to the government. I guess these are what qualify as constituents these days. The people themselves have long been forgotten as being constituents.
What do you mean "even" the libertarian party? Libertarians would remove whatever existing laws there are around facial recognition so that companies are free to do whatever they like with the data.
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Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play. Better to have better disclosure and de-anonymization in some cases. If some live in fear (e.g. of cartels), go after the cartels harder than they go after you.
> Anonymity is where bad actors play
That is a myth spread by control freaks and power seekers. Yes, bad actors prefer anonymity, but the quoted statement is intended to mislead and deceive because good actors can also prefer strong anonymity. These good actors probably even outnumber bad ones by 10:1. To turn it around, deanonymization is where the bad actors play.
Also, anonymity can be nuanced. For example, vehicles can still have license plates, but the government would be banned from tracking them in any way until a crime has been committed by a vehicle.
Not sure why you say that statement was intended to deceive?
Both good and bad actors benefit in the current system from anonymity. If bad actors had their identities revealed, they'd have a lot harder time being a bad actor. Good actors need anonymity because of those bad actors.
Anonymity is where little bad actors play. The big ones don't need to be anonymous because their nefariousness is legal, or they don't get prosecuted. See: waves vaguely in the direction of the US government.
That said, the recent waves vaguely in the direction of the US government has demonstrated the weakness of legal restrictions on the government. It's good to have something you can point to when they violate it, but it's too easily ignored. There's no substitute for good governance.
> Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play.
The problem is when the government changes the definition of 'bad actor'.
local laws forbidding facial recognition tech have never been wiser
How long before the bring the price down and local PD's start using it too?
Not sure if you're joking but Clearview's primary customers are local or metro police departments.
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