24 Comments
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Aaron Waddell's avatar

It does make a lot more sense now. I think most of us inherently knew that social media was evil. But we had no idea to what degree.

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water SOTR's avatar

What took you do long?

Ditto facebook, instagram, x, google search, ALL OF IT!!!

There has been no privacy for 20 years. How do youthink the tech billionaures BEXAMEruch in the first place?

Anybody actually think any of the data breaches were accidents??

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Lynn K Lally's avatar

Thank you for your writing. I appreciate your time and effort.

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𝓙𝓪𝓼𝓶𝓲𝓷𝓮 𝓦𝓸𝓵𝓯𝓮's avatar

I knew the TikTok "ban" was all about buying time to insert a federal "backdoor" to do just this thing.

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Linda Palmer's avatar

Palantir is part of a criminal enterprise to enrich itself and enslave us. They need to be arrested, indicted and prosecuted

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Filippos's avatar

It's Peter Thiel.

Only a massive RICO investigation would get results, but even that is highly improbable now that Trump has complete control of the DoJ.

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Maria Tambien's avatar

My IT son convinced me to move my VPN location to another country and it works. Do an internet search and you’ll get search results from that country and in their language. A couple of other things to consider, use a search engine like Duck Duck Duck Go that won’t track you, and if you use Safari activate Private Mode. And lastly, check your cookies, you’ll be blown away who is tracking you. Delete those sites or click Deny so they don’t pop up again. Government sites are persistent assholes.

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Jonathan Solomon's avatar

I saw somewhere that part of some legislation (perhaps the big bogus bill) is opening up the door to stop VPN privacy.

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Maria Tambien's avatar

They’ll try. My VPN service is outside the US.

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John Palmeter's avatar

Thanks for not putting that behind a paywall.

I think…Can’t unring that bell.

This makes a great deal of sense, and their plans surely won’t be limited to Tic-tok. Keep pushing and don’t stop. Please!

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Christine Rendon's avatar

Unfortunately, it’s not gonna be just the immigrants that ice is gonna use this for. They are eventually going to use it to go after any of the “undesirables“ that they no longer want in society. Unfortunately, that includes those of us who are against this administration. I do not see an end in sight to those they will use this against. If this administration continues and we do not reclaim this country over half of the people in this country are doomed.

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Liz's avatar

If I were someone that ICE would come after, I would lose the cell phone. You can be tracked by Homeland Security through it.

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Debra Seitz's avatar

So we know what to do then. Delete your accounts and destroy tiktok

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Peg Rockel's avatar

So everyone should get off TicToc?????

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Carl Allport's avatar

Would it be possible to poison the well? As in, if people create fake profiles with fake photos of people with fake tattoos, even multiple people wearing the same outfit in the same video, would that slow it down? It might waste a day or two of an agents time, or even a van load of ICE thugs waiting all day for someone who doesn't exist. One or two people doing this would have no effect, but tens of thousands...

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Filippos's avatar

That would never work. Humans can't overwhelm automated systems.

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Carl Allport's avatar

You don't have to overwhelm them, just corrupt the data to make the probabilities further away from 100%. Checking would require human intervention, slowing down the automation.

Compare it with training an AI- what would happen if someone who knew when the training was happening just happened to change a few digits of select Scientific Laws on Wikipedia for a few hours, like changing the eighth digit of Pi. Few would notice the change on Wikipedia, but everyone would see that the AI data made no sense.

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Filippos's avatar

I don't think you understand how predictive models work or how vast the datasets already are.

When they have millions of records that can be cross-checked automatically across multiple databases from various agencies and other sources, a few thousands of falsified data would be like a drop in the ocean. The system itself could easily disregard it if it doesn't match anything they already have.

Do you think those falsified leads would go so far down the pipeline that they would send vans with agents to random addresses?

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Carl Allport's avatar

They seem to be doing that already, turning up to houses looking for people who moved out weeks ago, trying to get access to the Dodgers Stadium etc. You're right about the scale and that it's a drop in the ocean but not about the probability- a data set that they can't rely on 100% is something that isn't always going to hold up in a court of law.

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Jonathan Solomon's avatar

I’m sure they’re mining Substack too.

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pat archer's avatar

He's out of it and Miller must be pleased.

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Filippos's avatar

Threatening to ban TikTok was Trump's way to pressure ByteDance to hand over the US user data to Oracle (Larry Ellison is one of Trump's biggest donors).

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/17/tiktok-oracle-us-traffic-china-access/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/25/trump-administration-reportedly-negotiating-an-oracle-takeover-of-tiktok/

From there, it was simple enough to give access to Peter Thiel's Palantir as well.

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Lynette Mason's avatar

Thanks for your analysis. Makes perfect sense.

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