[HillRat]

In general, I would expect an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete any sensitive records my customers are uploading, unless I explicitly opt-in otherwise. My guess is in this case that Discord is attempting to train its own models for first-pass verification, so this is a training corpus; there's no evidence that Persona's doing anything with Palantir, other than proximity of funding.

The broader issue here is that SV VC is starting to feel mildly radioactive when it comes to public opinion; Persona's previous lead fund (up through its Series B) was Index, run by the more conventionally-liberal Neil Rimer, and no one worried about that. The entanglement of Silicon Valley's oligarch class in very extreme politics* at a time of very fraught national political upheaval is making VC money politically-exposed money; if you take FF or Sequioa cash, how certain are you that they won't just get involved in your business, but push you to take specific political or social positions that serve their non-fiscal interests? How certain are your customers that that isn't happening to you?

For decades, SV venture capital has been tech money, and generally smart tech money (I don't like Thiel, but the man is absolutely the smartest of the PayPal Mafia set, and his success bears that out). Now, for various reasons (the end of ZIRP, the failure of major tech bets since 2016 or so to pay off, COVID overvaluations), VCs have moved into rent-seeking, particularly on government and military contracts. It's no longer tech money, it's political money, and, compared to traditional prime vendors, it's not clear that it's smart political money. After all, when the political winds turn, possibly as soon as this November, is it a smart strategy to have worked aggressively and incessantly to alienate the party coming into power? For a lot of startups with regulatory, legal, or political exposure risk, getting entangled with that might be more trouble than it's worth.

* There is no other term that suits the mix of open white supremacy and anti-democratic policies -- repealing the 19th Amendement, for example! -- that we see emerging from the PayPal Mafia.

[egorfine]

> I would expect an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete

I would expect exactly the opposite. See, KYC stuff is something that no one wants, everyone hates and something that everybody is forced into from both sides: users and companies. KYC service is a product being created in pure hatred.

There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.

At the same time proper storage security costs money and time and creates friction.

Thus there are NO incentives to securely keep user data while there IS an incentive to care as less as possible.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

KYC stuff is something that no one wants, everyone hates and something that everybody is forced into from both sides: users and companies

Is this accurate? I’m sure there are significant portion of people with a ‘if you have nothing to hide’ attitude. Companies also don’t care as long a it makes them money.

[gruez]

>There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.

Unlike credit bureaus (also hated), there's no moat for KYC providers. All you need is some AI model + humans to do the verification, and away you go. At best there's some compliance costs for soc2 or whatever, but not too pricey compared to the cost of a few programmers. There's definitely penalties for leaks/bad PR, as seen by discord cutting relationships with providers that turned out to have leaked data, or for Persona, seemingly bad PR.

[KittenInABox]

I believe the argument will be that the rent seeking will be used to position themselves such that it doesn't matter who is in power, the government will listen to them not the other way around. Admittedly, the fact is, the Epstein Files existed across multiple political parties' justice departments and none of those folks have been investigated or prosecuted...

[HillRat]

That's a model that works with SpaceX, which holds a unique grip on American orbital launch capability and capacity; less so for Anduril, which has been rather unsuccessful so far in its big-ticket drone-warfare efforts but has, to its credit, diversified key defense manufacturing areas by jumping into, e.g., SRMs; and possibly not at all for Palantir, which doesn't do anything a copy of Neo4J doesn't. And there's a real question regarding their ability to continue, post-DJT, holding security clearances given their personal lives and behaviors, their contacts with foreign officials, and whether they had derogatory information on other clearance holders that they did not bring forward.