this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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A Boring Dystopia

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Cool, cool cool cool. Nothing dystopian about that at all.

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[–] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 11 points 19 hours ago

Oh great the second I become president my DeviantArt is getting leaked

[–] eve@evecodes.com 22 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

What’s posted to the internet, STAYS on the internet. Forever. Stay safe friens

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Maybe someone should visit their offices

[–] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 14 points 23 hours ago

It was forensics. They used forensics. Ai did not help, probably got a bit in the way even. You can do these things with data. We told you several times

[–] WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Don't just be mad at palantir.

The American government funded palantir.

Palantir couldn't exist without the helping hand of the American government.

The time to give a fuck was long before Snowden made his leaks.

All the dystopian stuff people fear the government will do is already being done by a framework of companies funded by our government.

[–] tired_n_bored@lemmy.world 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Palantir is an evil company.

[–] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 19 hours ago

This was pretty evident the second they named their company over the tool used by The Dark Lord Sauron and Saruman to spy on the actions of others from Lord of the Rings.

[–] PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yup, data archival. Now imagine this future: right now, encrypted data transfers may be wire-tapped and stored. When quantum computers are available, all that traffic will be decryptable. This includes pretty much all general HTTPS traffic since TLS mostly uses ECDHE for key exchange which isn't quantum secure.
I bet nation state actors are recording everything they can.

[–] pool_spray_098@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

Damn, dude... that's insane and I'm surprised it's never occurred to me.

I've had the realization before as I realize that maybe my password database will eventually be easily cracked... but there's no reason it cannot apply to data in transit as well, as long as someone is recording it.

[–] betanumerus@lemmy.ca 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Sure. As far as I can tell Palantir sells the software that police, ICE and the military use to Face ID suspects, including "aliens" and Osama Bin Laden (way back when that happened).

Once you scan your face data and post it online, you can assume security agencies (Palantir clients) load it into Palantir software to complete your profile. Privacy is dead.

[–] nandeEbisu@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago

"deleted" eh?

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

OP is learning about archive.org for the first time?

[–] Ironfist79@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Quexotic@infosec.pub 51 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Like, they've been able to do this for 25 odd years.

There were gov data centers with thousands of petabytes when I was in college. Prism had the gov archiving every phone call and all internet traffic back in '08...

This is not news.

As soon as the quantum cryptography tech gets there, they'll start decrypting the signal and matrix chats you had yesterday.

Privacy is illusory and temporary.

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[–] scathliath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Fuckers should help me restore my old academic portfolio then. Might as well put living in a dystopian surveillance state to helpful use.

[–] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It seems like these sorts of things can be used against you, but whenever it might actually benefit you they always come up short.

[–] Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 5 points 1 day ago

I was screaming this when COVID first hit.

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretty sure they also have access to banned Reddit accounts whose users can no longer access their history to know what they will be judged and profiled for, too.

Just assume every social network either allows this directly or enables a third party to do it, Lemmy specially.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 120 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (10 children)

People apparently don't know about the NSA Utah Datacenter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Been a thing for over a decade, unimaginable total storage size, and they literally archive everything.

This place had between 3 and 12 exabytes of storage capacity, in 2013.

1 exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

How big was your pc/laptop hard drive in 2013?

Maybe... 250 gigs to 2 teras, something like that?

This data center could now easily be in the yottabyte range ( millions of exabytes ), maybe even ronnabytes ( billions of exabytes ).

https://www.rankred.com/largest-data-centers-in-the-world/

6th largest data center in the world by physical size, and it is the only one on this list explictly designated for 'national security'.

The NSA has taps on every single major trunk line going in or out of the US, they coordinate with every major US-based ISP, every major software provider, data center operator.

They have so much archived data that their actual problem is figuring out how to search through it efficiently... and that is a big thing that Palantir does, that was kinda their whole intitial... thing, as a company.

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[–] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

Remimds me of when everyone was deleting their posts around the API blackout and suddenly the next day it was like Reddit did a restore from checkpoint and all of the edited posts and deleted posts came right back. I for one had to run the script that replaced then delete my posts twice, but that's besides the point.

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[–] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 49 points 1 day ago (22 children)

As a software engineer I was a little shocked when I learned our company treats “Delete” buttons as a means to toggle Archived = 1 in the DB. Nothing is actually deleted. Sure we will anonymise the data after a certain time to be GDPR compliant but it would be trivial I guess to actually link that back to people.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 3 points 23 hours ago

My current workplace doesn't have for foresight to do that. Delete fully deletes immediately and without confirmation. Oh and the backups have been broken for years

On the upside, recent changes in leadership and on the team made it so we finally have the political will and talent in the right places to actually put effort into fixing backups but they have a lot of technical debt to sift through in fixing the last folks' mistakes and oversights

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