Not quite what you’re saying, but a couple of steps in that direction.
I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.
If anyone using palantir wants to draw incorrect conclusions based on unverified data, the impact to them is certainly going to worse than it is to any of us normal citizens
If your credit is impacted because someone made a mistake, that still fucks you over. It doesn't matter if it's real or not because the entire point of centralized data collection and analytics is that you don't need to care, the people doing the collecting and analyzing do it for you. So you just trust them with whatever. It's on YOU, the consumer, to catch these mistakes and spend a painstaking amount of time trying to fix them, and ultimately the consumer is the only one who will face any consequences. And when it comes to credit, these consequences are very material. It means maybe you can't get a car, or a home, or even a job these days. I know my job ran a credit check.
If we imbue these new-age data collection and analysis companies like Palantir and Flock in our systems, a lot of people will suffer, and I don't think anyone cares.
Poison their data. If they have evidence against you, and you can prove their data is even partially bad, you have your reasonable doubt.
Juries are increasingly on the side of the citizen , which is better than nothing
My credit example is actually giving the opponents too much credit here. The bureaus are kinda government. Even that is better!
I have a cellular hotspot with a phone number apparently recycled from someone who still has it tied to a fintech account (Venmo, or something similar). Every time this person makes a purchase, my hotspot screen lights up with an inbound text message notification.
This person makes dozens of purchases each day, but unlike my previous hotspots, this one does not have a web interface that allows me to log in and see the purchase confirmations. All I get to see is "Purchase made for $xx.xx at" on the tiny screen several dozen times a day.
Social media was a mistake.
Do not try LinkedIn. Not even once.
And is it just me, or has LinkedIn Recruiter become all the more useless after the LLM age? At least we're not renewing that abomination next year, opting to use more flesh-and-blood headhunters.
You can choose the option to tell TikTok you are 'not interested' in videos like these, or block the account entirely. There are legitimate criticisms about social media algorithms, but I don't understand why you jump to the conclusion that you have to delete your account.
They track and log every reel viewed.
I suppose everyone does it but actually seeing it is another level of creepy.
Sure maybe they exist in some corporate servers when the companies were sold for scraps. And I suppose if I became famous and someone wanted to write an expose about my youthful debauchery, but for all practical purposes all this stuff has disappeared. Or maybe not. How much do we know about the digital presence of someone like the guy who shot Trump or Las Vegas shooter. Or maybe it's known but hidden? I'm impressed that Amazon has my very first order from over 10 years ago, but that's just not par for the course.
Why would AI steal my identity and post as me? I'm not that interesting.
My data is just not the valuable and I imagine that within the next 5-10 years AI will be trained almost entirely on synthetic data.
Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity.
Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google .
Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble.
I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice.
Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.
"If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break."
If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.
It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.
We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.
And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".
We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.
However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.
I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.
Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.
Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt.
Just a heads up in case you didn't know, but generated comments are not allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.
eg:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704054
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085967
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085954
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976756
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40600057
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46102885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572704
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43979537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41237678
The comment here was a borderline case of the latter, but I think it was on the worthwhile side of the border, personally.
In any case, a blanket prohibition is pointless, because it won't be long before there's simply no way to tell.
Once Hacker News becomes nothing but bots posting stories written by bots for other bots to comment on - which is the inevitable end point of a permissive attitude towards this stuff - what even is the fucking point to any of this? SEO juice?
Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.
Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”
As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.
Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block.
Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.
Via discounts, promo codes, gamification, whatever else they’re using today to get people to install their apps and sign over their privacy.
The shareholders will be content, because they see value in that. The users might not, but not many of them are actual humans, nowadays they're mostly AI, who has time to read and/or post on social media? Just ask your favorite AI what's the hottest trends on social networks, it should suffice to scratch the itch.