This is a technology licensing case. Would you be angry at Google for licensing its search technology to help run background checks on childcare providers? Would you care if Facebook licensed its social graph technology to see if you should be eligible for a drivers' license based on your medical history?
Your response was they should, if those people were clearly committing crimes.
My response was, it's very rarely clear whether some is committing a crime or not from their web history, and that companies can be easily coerced into sharing information that is just indicative of a possible crime, which can lead to innocent people being harassed or charged.
Specifically thousands of crimes a day (if not more) are committed by Facebook users, and some of those users leave traces of those crimes on Facebook. Facebook is heavily incented to help turn in those criminals to show they are good corporate citizens, and to head off extensive regulation and even civil penalties that could be created by grand standing lawmakers. Facebook has little to no incentive to protect my rights.
Now my kid posts "I love weed" on their FB profile, and it's caught the massive dragnet of data being turned over to authorities every day from Facebook. Police get a warrant, bust down my door, and arrest my child if they find weed in their room. If my kid had a couple ounces of pot and the cops think I'm a jerk, they may seize my home.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hous...
If they don't find weed but find painkillers in my wife's purse not accompanied by her legal prescription for them, they will arrest her to justify the raid.
Or a dozen other bad things could happen, like they could shoot my barking 60 lb dog (who has never bitten anyone in her life), or worse.
So no, I don't want web service providers who have access to my personal information sharing that information with law enforcement. The police can do real police work to catch real criminals, most of their time they seem to abuse the constitution to arrest people for victimless crimes, I don't think they need more tools for that.
Thanks for proving the example false equivalence. Palantir is not a service provider to you, it is a data analysis company.
If Google or Facebook performed data mining on data it owned, that'd be one thing. Palantir is providing tools that analyze publicly available information.
> Or a dozen other bad things could happen
Yes, that's life. At any point any bad things can happen that's out of your control.
If somebody in your family posted "I love weed" on a public billboard, you might expect increased police attention.
Extrapolating a dead dog and painkiller arrests (both vanishingly rare events) are hysterical statements not based in fact.
So you might not be concerned about getting trapped in the maw of our now enormous law enforcement machine, but plenty of people are given virtually every adult in the US has committed a felony at one point or another because of one crazy law or another. Not only do I not want Google or Facebook using automated algorithms to pit me in the maw, I don't want them sharing that data with Palantir so it can do it either. That gives for Chase Bank, Verizon, etc.
Very very rarely does someone type into their browser that they want to rape a child, or share on Facebook their plans to bomb a plane. Instead the authorities make inferences, inferences that often lead to the harassment, even prosecution, of innocent people.