There is always a boss above the boss

We all know, but we are still not sufficiently aware of it. Be careful with the personal information you leave on social media. The smartphone makes it easy to take and upload photos. That's all well and good, but all those photos are also a "Fundgrube" for malicious hackers. The more photos, the more a hacker can learn about the person, but also about their relationships.

This means that a hacker does not only get a grip on the photographer, but also on their relationship and friends. By pretending to be or by taking over the identity of the photographer, the hacker can induce the relations to reveal more information about them. That can lead to extortion on a large scale. Once the information has landed on the Internet, it remains prey to any malicious subject.

Palantir

An average hacker can ruin the life of an average citizen, but that's nothing compared to what a company like Palantir can do.

The company's software is capable of completely destroying the lives of large groups of citizens. The Motherboard website found out by dissecting a manual from the company. The manual was written for agents using Palantir's software. This concerns police forces such as the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC). That is a so-called fusion center, part of the Homeland Security Intelligence Ministry. A fusion center collects and examines information it receives from institutions at the local, state and federal levels and from some private institutions. All this information disappears in large databases, where the Palantir software is subsequently released.

They will use all that data to look for relationships of people, regardless of whether they are suspected of something or not. The curiosity of the Homeland Security Ministry is great and broad, as the table below shows. The manual also shows that thanks to this broad field of investigation, the police can get very detailed information from citizens easily. Much more than even in their wildest dreams could be imagined and much more and much faster than one can ever achieve manually.

If the police have a name that can link it to a license plate of a car, then with the help of a license plate reader, the travel behavior of that person can be mapped in a certain period or in any period.

Once the police have a name, the e-mail address, telephone number, bank details, business relations and so on will soon follow. If there is a name, the software can map family members and other relationships and then also gather information about them. And so the net is thrown further and wider and more and more citizens are suspected or not in the crosshairs of the judiciary and police.

The extent to which things can subsequently go wrong for the individual citizen is demonstrated by the benefits affair of the Dutch tax authorities. It is, therefore, reasonable that civil rights organizations in the US are increasingly demanding attention on the operation of Palantir. After all, it is their software that makes it possible for the government to penetrate deeper into the private lives of its citizens. The average hacker can only dream of this.