>As PCGamer note, Persona's lead investors during two recent rounds of venture capital funding were Founders Fund, who valued them at $1.5 billion in 2021. The Founders Fund was co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2020.
>Palantir have, among other things, worked extensively with the USA's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, [...]
The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to Palantir or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Thiel, but is there any evidence for this? For instance, is Thiel known for meddling in the affairs of the companies his fund invests in, or pushing them together for collabs like what Musk does (eg. with x/x.ai/spacex)?
Previously, they handled this escalation path via Zendesk, which was breached revealing all of the messages with IDs.
Now, they're trying out Persona for this path.
> We don’t sell your personal information.
No evidence that they sell your data against their privacy policy has ever come to light, so I think you should probably back that claim with evidence if you think otherwise.
That's not true at all. I worked with Palantir on a project for a prior company and they'd basically do whatever you wanted if you paid them. They had a very heavy data / "AI" presence and this was years ago. They certainly do not just do integrations.
Peter Thiel's personal brand and Palantir are so toxic and creepy in the eyes of most of the public that you can basically just substitute 'Satan' in any statement involving them, and that's how it looks to regular people. Try it:
"The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to [one of Satan's companies] or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Satan"
So for anyone who cares about PR at all, the immediate instinct upon discovering you might be linked them is to reverse course and apologize profusely to your users.
Which is very funny and ironic given Thiel's weird ass personal beliefs.
Hint, it's optional.
(And while I'm not saying for eg PG is personally an anti privacy guy, it's impossible not to hold YC leadership accountable for aiding these cos, or at least looking away.)
However, HN isn’t asking for our ids yet.
That being said, no, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if Y Combinator sends data to Palantir.
You got a source for that? Because the only communication I've seen from Discord implies no data is sent when these scans take place, its supposed to all take place locally FIRST is my understanding. The only exception is if the local scan goofs in some way.
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
> Key privacy protections of Discord’s age-assurance approach include:
> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
> Straightforward age assurance: In most cases, users complete the process once and their Discord experience adapts to their verified age group. Users may be asked to use multiple methods only when more information is needed to assign an age group.
> Private status: A user’s age group status cannot be seen by other users.
> The only exception is if the local scan goofs in some way.
Basically this, if it fails or if you wish to escalate past that, then there's a path that would hit Persona (or, would have, they've since ended their relationship with Persona. Previously, you'd open a ticket in Zendesk, which is where data was breached from before).
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
A point I hadn't thought of before. A denial at this point wouldn't mean much because with the API and some sensible pacing anyone can access the information.
"Sends" is active. "Is scraped by" is the assumed passive.
Do you know Lyft and meta has links to Peter thiel?
I'm not sure. What I am pretty sure about is that none of those age verifying services are rolled out to protect children. Hence the question: then what for? And the only logical answer to this question is that one: to harvest data.
Remember, customers of Discord are facing a huge risk - that their identity could lead to the being detained or deported. Even if the chance is small they can’t take that risk. This Persona company is unfortunately not going to be acceptable to a rational user because of their affiliation.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spotify-ice-recruitment-ad...
The broader issue here is that SV VC is starting to feel mildly radioactive when it comes to public opinion; Persona's previous lead fund (up through its Series B) was Index, run by the more conventionally-liberal Neil Rimer, and no one worried about that. The entanglement of Silicon Valley's oligarch class in very extreme politics* at a time of very fraught national political upheaval is making VC money politically-exposed money; if you take FF or Sequioa cash, how certain are you that they won't just get involved in your business, but push you to take specific political or social positions that serve their non-fiscal interests? How certain are your customers that that isn't happening to you?
For decades, SV venture capital has been tech money, and generally smart tech money (I don't like Thiel, but the man is absolutely the smartest of the PayPal Mafia set, and his success bears that out). Now, for various reasons (the end of ZIRP, the failure of major tech bets since 2016 or so to pay off, COVID overvaluations), VCs have moved into rent-seeking, particularly on government and military contracts. It's no longer tech money, it's political money, and, compared to traditional prime vendors, it's not clear that it's smart political money. After all, when the political winds turn, possibly as soon as this November, is it a smart strategy to have worked aggressively and incessantly to alienate the party coming into power? For a lot of startups with regulatory, legal, or political exposure risk, getting entangled with that might be more trouble than it's worth.
* There is no other term that suits the mix of open white supremacy and anti-democratic policies -- repealing the 19th Amendement, for example! -- that we see emerging from the PayPal Mafia.
I would expect exactly the opposite. See, KYC stuff is something that no one wants, everyone hates and something that everybody is forced into from both sides: users and companies. KYC service is a product being created in pure hatred.
There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.
At the same time proper storage security costs money and time and creates friction.
Thus there are NO incentives to securely keep user data while there IS an incentive to care as less as possible.
Is this accurate? I’m sure there are significant portion of people with a ‘if you have nothing to hide’ attitude. Companies also don’t care as long a it makes them money.
The UK's NHS is already quite close with Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/uk/
Should we never do business with anyone who was convicted of a crime?
To do what, exactly? This is public money being spent. Why are you so eager to be ignorant of it?
> from massive multinational.
Let's be honest: "Health company buys software from US defense monopolist."
> They also work with Google, Azure and AWS
Yes, and you and I can also buy those products and use them, do you use any of palantirs products in your daily life?
And how exactly is the NHS making use of it? What problems is it solving for them? What new capabilities do they have now that they've deployed it?
> who is ignorant of anything?
B2B is as generic of a label as you can get.
These guys are just making it up as they go. Very comforting approach to personal data... /s
That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces.
What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.
I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly.
It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.
First market forces incentivize consolidation (which imo killed off the vibrant early internet...), then a few players got really powerful.
Once you have that much money and power, and given the inevitable corruptability of politicians, it makes sense to try and use that money to try and manipulate market rules in your favor.
The evolution of the internet has been an in-vitro demonstration of capitalism failure modes and as somebody who liked the internet, that's very unfortunate.
"ad-hominem is ugly and wrong, like you"
They are not friendly.
And if you are gonna make the argument that people are brainwashed to think its left vs right, then you are automatically in favor of an authoritarian ruling class because people can't be trusted to make the right choice.
Point to any such activity under the Democratic rule where federal government was specifically requesting data on in individuals that are simply critical of them if you wanna prove me wrong.
Remind everyone, which party was blocking this support for as long as possible, with a hole lot of media circus and scaremongering?
Also, I would highly urge you to consider the fact that you are defending pdf files running the government. You really don't want to go down the road of political arguments and out yourself as one.
I find it impossible to believe that age verification services are rolled out for what they say they are.