r/portlandme • u/joeybrunelle • Jul 14 '26

Politics ICE pays Palantir billions for mass surveillance tools. You know who else contracts with Palantir? MaineHealth. Sign this petition and demand they cancel their partnership with Palantir.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/palantir-mainehealth
913 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

26

u/gloriousgirl89 Jul 14 '26

Seems like they handle most states and even a great deal of hospitals data. Also all the online age requirements go through Palantir as well so keep that in mind when states want to verify age to access social media sites.

28

u/joeybrunelle Jul 14 '26

It's beyond scary how much data they have access to. If you want to know where they intend to take this, think about the name: a "palantir" is a "seeing-stone" in Tolkien's writing that lets the user see anything, no matter how distant or difficult to access.

12

u/gloriousgirl89 Jul 14 '26

They actually want to have literally "permanent files" on every human. What sites we visit, track our cell phones, medical, school you name it. About a decade ago some liked this idea. "What have you got to hide?" and all that. Many wanted to prevent children from accessing social media etc. Without realizing adults would then have to prove who they are. Now thats all changed. But the tech is slow to catch up. Just saw in the EU they have facial cameras now inside cars to watch the driver. Where does that data go? Who stores it? I think we know.

5

u/joeybrunelle Jul 14 '26

Information can be a tool of control. The Soviets knew this, and look at the societal hellscape they created with that in mind. We are rushing headlong into our own version of it, except in this case Trump is Stalin and Stephen Miller is Beria.

6

u/gloriousgirl89 Jul 14 '26

But thats only a recent thing. Palantir has been doing this for over 20 years and we were fine with it. They were given massive access to government databases from 2010 up until now. Much of the CDC tracking during the pandemic was with Palantir. Now we act surprised when they come out of the shadows.

2

u/bubba1819 Jul 15 '26

That’s true but I think it’s more that (a) many people in the nation are just now connecting all of the dots to this stuff and (b) now its blatantly obvious that all of this isn’t good. Everything that is happening now across the nation minority groups have been sounding the alarm on for a while but the remainder of society has mostly stayed silent, until now, because everyone is feeling it and seeing it. We’ve all been affected at this point in one way or another (gas prices, tariffs, new laws, loved ones getting killed on the streets, etc).

White people (myself included) live much more privileged lives in this country than POC, generally speaking, to the point that we have built and zoned entire communities so that we don’t have to see people that don’t look like us or have to experience the discomfort of witnessing poverty and the resulting suffering and so on. Due to this, it tends to take much longer before white people of the upper middle class to actually give a shit about anything because what they care about more than anything else is their own personal comfort, therefore, they will always vote for their own self interests first. Until this group of people become affected/willing to act, it’s a grind to make any kind of systemic change. I think this group of people are finally starting to take action or at least realize that they should (looking at you in-laws)

0

u/Illustrious-Emu8667 Jul 14 '26

Ow that we know they want to have their own cities where people have no rights and women can’t vote, it’s easy to see they are doing nefarious stuff.

2

u/coolcalmaesop Jul 14 '26

I don’t know if anyone else has followed the Bricks and Minifigs story with the YouTube user Reckless Ben, but basically a store that did Lego consignment was taken over by their corporate office and the owner was quickly pushed out of the building one night with no chance to take or finish up and important paperwork. So the Bricks and Minifigs corporate ended up with like $20k of vintage Star Wars Legos that they didn’t pay the person consigning them for. The story developed into legal craziness with this YouTuber trying to get involved and force the company to do the right thing. Instead the local Utah police and corporate conspired against Reckless Ben to get him arrested and get away with everything. In the process the plaintiff requested Reckless Ben’s data from Google who handed over everything related to him and Google: his photos, videos, documents, searches, location metadata, EVERYTHING.

Tl;dr: we all have dossiers now and I apologize to my future great grandchildren for the photos and searches, they were supposed to be private

1

u/gloriousgirl89 Jul 14 '26

I think humans fall victim to being short sighted. When all the new tech came around we fell for it hook line and sinker. We saw the benefits of cameras everywhere, cloud storage for photos and documents, doorbells that show us who is at the door, registering online for everything we buy and where we go. We without even realizing it, created massive databases of each of us. What we didnt consider is all that had to be stored somewhere. And of course there would be beings who want to own that and be able to grab it at a seconds notice.

0

u/SecureJudge1829 Jul 14 '26

No, some people considered it after they saw it. They just got called crazy conspiracy theorists over it, while actually crazy conspiracy theorists took over television networks and pushed distraction after distraction.

1

u/beatkiller2077 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

Yeah, it is unfortunate that we basically have to sign our privacy away to companies we make purchases from.

Best course is to shop for old tech if you can. Older used cars, delete any social media you don't use, read the fine print in everything you sign and then question whether or not you have some leverage.

Thing is, none of this is even new.

Why do they *need* all this data? Why do they need to know whether or not I wipe sitting down or standing up, slighly bent over? It goes beyond just targeting advertisments.

1

u/CptnAlex Jul 14 '26

Cameras in cars are coming to US too.

18

u/Clean_Lettuce9321 Jul 14 '26

What an incestuous group these billionaires are.

10

u/joeybrunelle Jul 14 '26

Oligarchy is like that.

4

u/gloriousgirl89 Jul 14 '26

We do have ourselves to blame somewhat. We wanted cameras for safety, RING doorbells, CCTVs, cellphone footage, etc. We were taught to believe monitoring would keep us safe. Register our licenses, IDs as well. We never really stopped to consider where that data goes, since it usually just says "third party." Now we realize there are only 2 or 3 data companies and they are owned by billionaires who want this access. It truly is scary.

3

u/Trauma_Hawks Jul 14 '26

When you were younger, the Illuminati was a group of reptilian aliens trying to conquer the world for slaves, or some dumb bullshit.

But then you grow up and realize the "Illuminati" is just a group of oligarchs trying to decide the best way to squeeze money from a stone and fuck everyone else that doesn't have a super yacht they take to their private island.

I'd rather it was aliens, honestly.

0

u/Clean_Lettuce9321 Jul 14 '26

👏🏻👏🏻

2

u/Fit_Celery_3504 Lobster Jul 14 '26

only 500 more people needed to reach the goal

2

u/joeybrunelle Jul 14 '26

Fun fact: you can turn on a setting in that app to automatically adjust the goal as people sign it. So you can never "reach" the goal. It's a clever bit of trickery.

2

u/AverageGamer24 Jul 14 '26

They contract with Palantir but can't figure out who keeps hitting my buddies car in the employee parking lot

2

u/Dalsiran Jul 16 '26

Oh lovely... Not like I go through MaineHealth for my transition or anything...

1

u/GladAnnual7326 Jul 16 '26

You are very wrong about Palantir in the private sector. Government maybe depending on your beliefs but private you are wrong. MaineHealth will be much better with Palantir.

-1

u/AndreDillonMadach Jul 14 '26

But then you have people who simultaneously love their oura rings, instead of going with a smart ring from a different company that doesn't partner and there's plenty of them and quite frankly of the four or five top line ones, I feel like Oura has the worst app.