There are two surprising aspects of this to me. Firstly that the employees feel confident enough to express concern about Palantir’s actions in official channels. I would have thought that the nature of their work was obvious enough that this would be a cultural taboo and therefore self-censored. I guess some of them have limits to suspending disbelief for what they had likely internally framed as “work for the benefit of national security” or “job pays too well to care”.
The second part is that not all of this official channel discussion was immediately wiped by Palantir, but perhaps they also relied on the premise of self-censorship in preventing these conversations at scale.
Either way, I’m somewhat relieved there’s someone at Palantir worried about this at all. The more of them who are worried by this, the more leaks we’ll see.
Link is to a shit pdf on a proton drive. It’s a basic description of the Google auction house. The prices they list are largely driven by the bids advertisers place, but that’s not to say Google doesn’t charge a bigger minimum for different demographic segments, they very much do. As does Facebook etc.
For example, one reason that parents are worth less is because of the products they listed. Diapers cost less than business lawyers, so the margins are much slimmer, so advertisers aren’t going to bid as much for an ad placement.
It does miss one thing that is, in my opinion, one of the more revolting aspects of their auction house. As a bidder your dollar is worth less than a big company’s dollar, even as little as one tenth. You could bid a million dollars on an ad space that Apple only bid $100001 on and you’d lose. That gap is dynamically calculated (at least in part) based on comparative search rankings.
Here’s the text without their ad at the end: