Cool, cool cool cool. Nothing dystopian about that at all.
There are dedicated tools, called Social Listening tools that do just these. Some examples are Brandwatch, Sprinklr, Talkwalker and Meltwater.
Not just Palantir, anyone and everyone is using these tools. From consumer companies to investment banks to your favourite content creator is using some kind of social listening to stay on top of trends and understand how you behave.
Reddit and Twitter are two social platforms that provide the most data openly and freely, and in reddit’s case you can get a lot of historical data without extra cost.
Your favourite candle brand, and your favourite outdoor clothing company and protein shake company is part of your favourite reddit community listening to what you’re talking about. They know if you like energy drinks, you might light heavily scented bath soaps too.
Deleted posts show up on these platforms quite often but when you click on them to go to reddit or twitter you’ll get a not found or deleted page.
PS: I’ve been working in social listening for last 8 years.
Could you stop enabling the police state, please?
I wish lmao. But there are tons of data companies selling all kinds of data on people to whoever will pay them for it. Me working for identifying trends or what flavour of green tea is popular are less harmful use cases.
What we need is regulation to reign in big tech. These API licenses are expensive and I suspect is a big reason why Reddit ended free data sharing (which led to death of third party reddit clients).
Why are you doing evil work…? Like… Why develop these tools that will so obviously be used to worsen our lives?
Gotta eat. Blame the system that creates this incentive not some individual wageslave
Yes, but you can choose how to earn ypur living. It is unlikely they cannot do amy other job.
I think coming out of an MBA, this is one of the less harmful jobs. I’d rather not be in consulting or investment banking or sales or big tech.
I agree but at the same time, in a different thread who’s topic specifically is shaming a company for working on the white house, people are foaming from their mouths that someone is working for Trump and downvote anyone who disagrees. The double standard is just mine blowing.
Like ICE
I feel like there’s a big difference between snatching people off the street and making ad targeting smarter. Yeah they both suck, but orders of magnitude here.
Yes of course, but the excuse is the same
I can use a knife to open a box or open a person. Are these things the same because I used the same tool?
I’m not American so I don’t know the tools ICE uses and if social listening or whatever it is called is one of those tools. But if your reasoning for opening the box and the reasoning for opening the person is the same… well it’s the same. Different outcomes, same reason
making ad targeting smarter
The word you’re looking for is “spying”.
when these types of tools are used to decide whomto snatch I hope that is cold comfort
I’ve been working mostly on the analysis side of things, currently I do this for a consumer goods company.
And yes I do it to make a living. Got hired as an analyst in this field out of MBA and stayed in this. Also being chronically online and familiar with social networks helped.
go on, tell us more
There isn’t much to tell. We gather conversations and analyse it to understand consumer behaviour, trends, campaign performance etc.
If you don’t want your data showing up in social listening tools, make your social accounts as private as possible.
I can tell you from the perspective of someone working in consumer insights for a consumer company, sales and retail data is far more important and influences decisions way more.
So I’d say put your money where your mouth is. If you don’t like certain companies or brands stop buying their products. If you think groceries are getting expensive buy cheaper alternatives or private labels. You can do this with a lot of non-food grocery items. Private label is almost always cheaper and you get pretty much the same shit as global brands.
I see a lot of conversations of people mentioning how expensive things have gotten, yet we see in sales data that our expensive products sell more (this is also due to the fact that more ad dollars are spent on higher margin products) but try and buy cheaper alternatives whenever you can.
‘Social Listening’ is uh, one way to brand ‘corporate surveillance panopticon’, I guess hahah!
Oh god I’m so glad I am an ex-corpo, the stupid fucking lingo and buzzwords alone should be enough to make most people realize they are in a cult, but I guess not.
Anything ever posted online can be archived and searched later. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to cross reference publicly available sources along with subpoenaed data.
I think even Facebook said years ago it’s less taxing on the systems to unlink content rather than delete it.
Yeah but that’s basically how deleting works for any normal system. You remove the pointer telling the computer where the data is, then you flag that section of data as free for writing to. It’s not until something writes over the data is it truly gone.
It’s true except in a filesystem you lose the name and location and it can be overwritten. In this instance it sounded like they just prevent access but keep all that data there, still accessible and readable and wont be overwritten.
That’s not what’s happening here.
Think of a database where nothing is editable. You can only add additional data. So you can’t delete a post you can only add a deleted = true flag.
Much easier to keep this kind of database in sync.
Ah gotcha, very bogus. Kinda speaks to how cheap storage is, doesn’t it?
Once you put anything on the public internet these days, it will be harvest by corporations and used against you eventually
I think we all should keep speaking up.
Be unpredictable
There was a browser extension back in the day that ran junk searches to poison whatever data they were harvesting on you. Sounds like it needs to make a comeback.
There’s a browser addon called Meta Random Search which sends your queries randomly through google, bing, ddg, yahoo and other search engines so that nobody has a full history. Paired with a user agent switcher (personally using Chameleon on Firefox) with a high frequency of change (1 min or so) and disabled browser telemetry it might throw them off already even without poisoning results. Especially since every query consumes natural resources I’m not really a fan of this approach.
What I find more concerning is, how did they get his reddit username?
The obvious strong link is reddit+email. Someone could have got into his personal, probably old mailbox, where original registration letters (with r/handle) and notifications still are. I find it more probable, but since government is under MAGA, they could’ve used some way to ask Huffman if some account matches the mail address.
This is why I resisted attaching emails to reddit accounts for years. Recently subs have started soft banning users without registered emails though, so I started just using throwaways.
“Deleted”
Hot. Hot, hot, hot.
Convinced we somehow ended up in the darkest timeline.
Just in time for the genocide of free thinkers. Lucky us!
Fuckers should help me restore my old academic portfolio then. Might as well put living in a dystopian surveillance state to helpful use.
It seems like these sorts of things can be used against you, but whenever it might actually benefit you they always come up short.
I was screaming this when COVID first hit.
Imagine thinking your privacy is above profit where capitalism rules lmao
You muricas are too dumb to understand that nothing has more power than money on a profit driven society like yours, like the ones your stupid elite forced upon every country’s throat as they could
Your “market freedom” is actually money dictatorship, EUA is not a free country
TIL America is the only capitalist country
No! Read my comment again, it’s the only country that bomb other countries that do not want to participate in this prehistoric system
For as long as Reddit has been available there have been places that would scrape it and mirror deleted/edited comments. I don’t remember what any of them are so people would use them all the time to figure out what someone said before they were banned.
There were also sites that you could put in a username and it would give you a pretty in depth summary of the person’s location and facts about them.
“deleted” eh?
OP is learning about archive.org for the first time?
At one point it was possible to download every reddit comment ever. I think it was around 10 years ago I had a copy of that. I can’t remember if it was from reddit directly or from some third party with scrapers. I recall the dataset being free… but it might have been free for me because I had an academic justification? Really don’t recall.
Anyways, point being that you’re delusional if you think anything you post online ever goes away. Secondly, you can be much less than palentir and have “deleted reddit account comments”. Anyone can get them.
Peter Thiel knows about the anti christ
You don’t need AI for this, just a ton of money for storage and either tolerance for a slow query (like 15-20 minutes) or an engineer who knows what they’re doing in search.
This should come as no surprise. We all knew they were storing everything away in data centers for decades now. Once AI hit the scene it was over. I knew right at that moment they would use it to parse all that information. That’s why I stopped using social media in a way that could be used to identify my more violent and anarchistic takes. I’m sure I could still be found out, but I’ll not be making it easy for the bastards. Fuck Republicans for fear mongering all of this for my entire life and now cheering for it to be used against their perceived enemies, traitorous cocksuckers.
Hey, this guy over here is hiding ‘more violent and anarchisic takes’.
We’re not sure what that means so better lock you up just in case. Law Shmaw.
