There is one company called Palantir which is building "software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts of disparate data". Founded in 2003/2004 by Standford graduates and PayPal alumni in order to fight terrorism and cybercrime, the company was initially backed with USD 2 million by In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture capital fund) and is already valued at USD 8 billion, just 10 years after starting the business. With the overall goal to "enable people to ask the questions they need answered in a language they understand", the company “sells a powerful line of data-mining and analysis software that maps out human social networks for counter-intelligence purposes” (please see http://www.palantir.com/what-we-do/).
By doing so, Palantir’s service and software is of great interest for CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Special Operations Command, the Army, Marines and Air Force, as well as the police departments of New York and Los Angeles. In order to understand their high interaction with the government organizations in the U.S, especially in connection with the current NSA discussions, please feel free to read http://timshorrock.com/?p=1811. By taking a closer look at the company and its growth prospects, data mining and analysis seems to evolve to a huge industry and interest field for large corporations like JPMorgan Chase and News Corp as well (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/08/16/cia-funded-data-miner-palantir-not-yet-profitable-but-looking-for-8-billion-valuation/).
And this is actually the scary part of this. With companies growing that fast, setting up that much of knowledge and saving that much information about the users of the Internet, it can be assured that this data will also be shared/sold to corporations and more parties of interest. Therefore: a) should we be afraid that we are not just monitored by the governments, but also by large corporations as well? b) Will our privacy on the Internet disappear in the next years? What is your opinion?
2 comments:
There were true cases in China, where employees got fired after posting grudges about work or bosses. Have you heard of the recent case of 4.6 Million Snapchat user contacts leaked?
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/hackers-claim-to-publish-list-of-4-6m-snapchat-usernames-and-numbers/
Well, keep your seat-belt fastened during the social networking flight!
It happened within our organization too.
An employee was sacked after his derogatory post about the CEO posted on Facebook was found out.
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