>Discord have belatedly confirmed that they're working with Persona, an identity detection firm backed by a fund directed by Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, as part of Discord's new global age verification system rollout.
>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)?
I think it's prudent to assume that these companies are selling your information to anyone with two nickels to rub together, regardless of which tech celebrities they are linked to.
This. The data collection is the product, that’s why it’s free.
But it's not free. Persona is hugely expensive.
If you want to buy it yourself, it is. Discord is using Persona because it’s backed by Thiel and the “Founders Fund”. They want your data.
Discord has investors from multiple venture funds but Tencent is a large contributor. Yes, that Tencent.
I'd like to believe that Tencent has information gathering methods more sophisticated than asking me to send them a picture of my driver's license.
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This is the part that loses me, my understanding was that this was only supposed to scan things offline, not collect any PII. Are they lying about not collecting the face scanned data?
There's two paths for verification, and the discussion on them is muddying things. There's k-id, which is the local-only age verification, and then there's a secondary process for places where k-id is indeterminate or their system flags you as possibly still being underage, and requires ID verification.
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.
There is no reason to trust them, and many not to.
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Palantir is an integration company. There are plenty of data brokers to scrutinize. i.e. discord itself sells your data.
https://discord.com/privacy
> 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.
To play devils advocate (i know nothing about discords use of data), isnt it trivial for any corporate counsel make legal statements like this that are not truthful? For example: we dont sell your data... we freely give it to our sister company with a common owner that sells your data.
That’s illegal under CCPA so if they did that to the data any California resident they would be in big trouble. More or less any transfer of data for which the company receives some benefit counts as a “sale” under CCPA.
https://www.clym.io/blog/ccpa-selling-and-sharing-what-count...
It's really simple. If you sell ads, you sell private information.
> Palantir is an integration company
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.
They don't buy or sell data.
They certainly say they don’t. Its a company that I don’t think would have any qualms about lying through its teeth.
It doesn't matter if he's known to meddle in the affairs of the companies in which he owns equity stakes. Owning the stake means he could meddle.
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.
> 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. [...]
Which is very funny and ironic given Thiel's weird ass personal beliefs.
The irony is not lost on me. Thiel's political activism on the side of people who will immediately give him the Alan Turing treatment the first chance they get is a howler for the ages.
Money buys influence.
Hey, no need to defame Satan.
Well, one of the two used to be an angel
Do we need evidence beyond it being linked to Thiel? Being linked to one of the most evil people in America seems like more than enough to me.
He is also linked to ycombinator which owns hacker news. If we are that reductionist, would you say that hacker news sends data to Palantir.
Well, the privacy darling Flock was from the YC 2017 summer batch, so I think it's already known what VCs think about ethics if it can make good money.
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.)
I would say that HN's data is public so if Palantir wants it they already have it, unlike identifying documents collected by discord that connect discord identities to real identities.
Can I get every user's IP address and the login times publicly? Can I run fingerprinting code for the users?
Sure, just post something front page worthy, or get your minions to push your data collection endpoint there.
Why would you think it doesn't?
For nearly 8 years YC would't even mention his name in podcast or other discussions. All because of the backlash just by mentioning it.
Probably does
Well it doesn't have to send much since 99% of information is already public. But I still would not doubt it for a second, there is no reason to think otherwise. There is no benefit to not sending them data and no downside to sending it.
One big difference is that Discord literally told people they were going to be using their data for a Theil backed experiment. That's a lot different than the possibility that a company might send your data.
That being said, no, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if Y Combinator sends data to Palantir.
> One big difference is that Discord literally told people they were going to be using their data for a Theil backed experiment.
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.
> 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.
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...
Fair enough, thank you! I was so confused, I'm trying to follow the story.
I don't think people are nearly as concerned about their selfie as they are for the security of their identifying documents, which Discord has already screwed up in securing once during this fiasco.
> That being said, no, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if Y Combinator sends data to Palantir.
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.
This sites ties to Thiel and people like him are problematic yes.
However, HN isn’t asking for our ids yet.
I'm not a LLM, but you're absolutely right. That conclusion is sound.
What does “linked to” mean? And why are you using such moralistic language?
The link is described in the first line of the article.
The link is it’s funded by Founder’s Fund.
Do you know Lyft and meta has links to Peter thiel?
Meta, the famously ethical, privacy-first, "move slow and make sure you do right by the people" company.
...yeah. We're aware.
Well glad we are honest here. I personally would find an article talking about meta as a “thiel backed entity” as something trying to prey on fear
Some peoples actions make them evil.
Is it binary? Are we talking utilitarianism?
> Is it binary? Are we talking utilitarianism?
Is the Nile just a river in Egypt? Are we asking bad-faith questions?
Bad faith is using sentences like this:
> one of the most evil people in America
I want to know what this sentence means besides “I don’t like this person”
I also think selectively associating everything with palantir because the same VC participates is dishonest.
>Bad faith is using sentences like this:
> one of the most evil people in America
That's not bad faith under any meaningful definition of that term.
>I want to know what this sentence means besides “I don’t like this person”(
It means that Peter Thiel's goals, if fulfilled, will bring immense harm to others, and the extent to which he was able to attain goals of that sort is hardly rivaled by any other person in the US.
Now, nobody is under any obligation to break down clearly written English sentences for you, but if you have difficulty understanding them, the right thing to do would be to simply ask questions like "Why do you say this?", or "What do you mean exactly?".
Not "Is it binary? Are we talking utilitarianism?".
>I also think selectively associating everything with palantir because the same VC participates is dishonest.*
The association is not just because "the same VC" participates, but because "the same VC" is Peter Thiel (a very influential individual, huge contributor to the Heritage foundation and Project 2025, mentor of VP J.D. Vance, and someone seen as one of the most evil people and America), and Palantir is Peter Thiel's mass surveillance company which is the foundation on which Peter Thiel has built his fortune (not just a company in which he's a VC, it's a company he founded and got immensely rich off of).
Ignoring these facts - now, that's dishonest.
> Heritage foundation and Project 2025, mentor of VP J.D. Vance
Left wing boogie man words. You’re telling me he’s Soros backed and studies Frankfurt school rn.
> and Palantir is Peter Thiel's mass surveillance company
It’s a company he invested in which does surveillance for the government. It doesn’t do surveillance for him. Does PayPal manage his money?
But once again, what’s the connection here? He once invested in palantir, and his fund (of which there are many managers) once invested in this company.
Are you going to be consistent? Have you stayed in Thiel backed housing in the past year? Are you using Thiel’s internet or taxis?
> It means that Peter Thiel's goals, if fulfilled, will bring immense harm to others
Ok then let’s hear arguments against those. Don’t hide behind moralism.
There is no way in which discord using this company for identity leads to Peter thiel taking over the world or getting all your information.
>Left wing boogie man words. You’re telling me he’s Soros backed and studies Frankfurt school rn.
No, I am telling you that he is actively involved in global politics at the highest levels, and wields influence over both the executive branch of the US government as well as the Congress.
>[Palantir] is a company he invested in which does surveillance for the government.
No, it's not a company he "invested in".
It's a company in which Peter Thiel is a central co-founder, the chairman of the board, and a major shareholder.
You are deliberately downplaying his involvement in Palantir here. You won't say that Meta is a company that Zuckerberg has "invested in", or that Google was a company Page and Brin "invested in". It's silly.
>Does PayPal manage his money
No, because:
1. He's not involved with PayPal anymore, and
2. PayPal has never been a money management company. They're a money transfer company.
When he was involved in a money transfer company, however, it would be in his interest for every money transfer in the world to be take place via PayPal.
Now that he is in surveillance business, it is in best interest that everyone person in the world would be surveilled by his company.
>It doesn’t do surveillance for him
You're funny. It does surveillance for whoever has access to the data. Which he does.
>Have you stayed in Thiel backed housing in the past year? Are you using Thiel’s internet or taxis?
No, no, and no. (Own house, own car, and Comcast has no connection to Thiel).
I am consistent.
>Ok then let’s hear arguments against those.
Google is your friend, nobody here owes you an argument. You asked what the parent comment meant, and I explained this to you clearly enough.
In general, I would expect an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete any sensitive records my customers are uploading, unless I explicitly opt-in otherwise. My guess is in this case that Discord is attempting to train its own models for first-pass verification, so this is a training corpus; there's no evidence that Persona's doing anything with Palantir, other than proximity of funding.
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 an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete
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.
KYC stuff is something that no one wants, everyone hates and something that everybody is forced into from both sides: users and companies
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.
>There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.
Unlike credit bureaus (also hated), there's no moat for KYC providers. All you need is some AI model + humans to do the verification, and away you go. At best there's some compliance costs for soc2 or whatever, but not too pricey compared to the cost of a few programmers. There's definitely penalties for leaks/bad PR, as seen by discord cutting relationships with providers that turned out to have leaked data, or for Persona, seemingly bad PR.
I believe the argument will be that the rent seeking will be used to position themselves such that it doesn't matter who is in power, the government will listen to them not the other way around. Admittedly, the fact is, the Epstein Files existed across multiple political parties' justice departments and none of those folks have been investigated or prosecuted...
That's a model that works with SpaceX, which holds a unique grip on American orbital launch capability and capacity; less so for Anduril, which has been rather unsuccessful so far in its big-ticket drone-warfare efforts but has, to its credit, diversified key defense manufacturing areas by jumping into, e.g., SRMs; and possibly not at all for Palantir, which doesn't do anything a copy of Neo4J doesn't. And there's a real question regarding their ability to continue, post-DJT, holding security clearances given their personal lives and behaviors, their contacts with foreign officials, and whether they had derogatory information on other clearance holders that they did not bring forward.
I mean it probably is willing to do unsavory things and that’s the problem. Startups often are pressured by investors to do things to get continued funding in the next round. You’re already taking so much risk, you wouldn’t risk more by being on the bad side of a VC. You have to cooperate with their other portfolio companies - basically all VCs expect this. So yes, merely having Peter Thiel around is a problem.
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.
> is there any evidence for this
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.
All these people are in the same rotten ideological boat. It's safe to assume that, as long as they're not competing for the same pile of money, they're cooperating. If not now, then eventually.
Mentioning Palantir on the internet right now is like socially acceptable qanon, in that any semblance of critical thinking or evidence is rapidly discarded if it gets in the way of a good story.
if a companys express purpose is to milk the populace , anything but abject scorn is tacit agreement to being milked
Oh the irony in this comment. A lot of QAnon nonsense is actually credible, now. It's just not pointing as many fingers at the people it lead people to believe.
It’s a pretty safe assumption that any headline prominently featuring “Thiel-“ will not be substantiated by its article body. If we applied this standard of evidence to every pair of entities separated by one or two degrees of common investor, we’d have a whole industry of tainted corporations with dubious motives. (Oh wait…)
Can he make a profit doing it? If so, then yes, he's probably doing it. You don't become a billionaire by having scruples.
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Definitely, a Spotify boycott would only be necessary if they ran ads for ICE, but that would be ridiculous...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spotify-ice-recruitment-ad...
Why would you oppose ICE though ?
Are you a criminal ?
Were you calling for boycotts in 2015 when Obama presented Tom Homan the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Executive for his effectiveness in deporting illegal immigrants while serving as the executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations at ICE ?