Peter Thiel first rose to prominence by defending gay bashing at Stanford.
He then became rich as one of the founders of PayPal by using the same tactics later used by Uber: Ignoring regulations because ……… INTERNET, meaning little in the way of due process or customer service, which saved money until regulators finally (20+ years later) caught up
Then he founded Palantir, where he does surveillance for dictators and government agencies who are legally prohibited from mining the data themselves.
And now we find that he is hip deep in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Seriously, he’s been so close to ineluctable evil for so long, I’ve begun to think that his street address is 668, the neighbor of the beast:
As a start-up called Cambridge Analytica sought to harvest the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans in summer 2014, the company received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon Valley contractor to American spy agencies and the Pentagon.
It was a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building Cambridge’s psychological profiling technology, who suggested the scientists create their own app — a mobile-phone-based personality quiz — to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
Cambridge ultimately took a similar approach. By early summer, the company found a university researcher to harvest data using a personality questionnaire and Facebook app. The researcher scraped private data from over 50 million Facebook users — and Cambridge Analytica went into business selling so-called psychometric profiles of American voters, setting itself on a collision course with regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Britain.
The revelations pulled Palantir — co-founded by the wealthy libertarian Peter Thiel — into the furor surrounding Cambridge, which improperly obtained Facebook data to build analytical tools it deployed on behalf of Donald J. Trump and other Republican candidates in 2016. Mr. Thiel, a supporter of President Trump, serves on the board at Facebook.
“There were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data,” said Christopher Wylie, a data expert and Cambridge Analytica co-founder, in testimony before British lawmakers on Tuesday.
Peter Thiel is like some sort of demonic Forrest Gump.