And the great thing about it is that you already signed all your rights away for them to do this exact thing, when we could have had an open world with open models run locally instead where you got to keep your private health information private.
You would not be privy to their internal processes, and thusfar not be able to prove wrong doing. You would just have to hope for a new Snowden and that the found wrongdoings would actually be punished this time.
Also, in some cases: they absolutely do. Try to get hired in Palantir and see how much they know about your browsing history. Anything related to national security or requiring clearances has you investigated.
For instance back when I was interviewing at startups and other companies where I was going to be a strategic hire, I would casually mention how much I enjoyed spending time on my hobbies and with my family on the weekend so companies wouldn’t even extend an offer if they wanted someone “passionate” who would work 60 hours a week and be on call.
But is it really so hard to imagine a world where your individual choice to "opt-out" or work for companies that don't use that info is a massive detriment to your individual life? It doesn't have to be every single company doing it for you to have no _practical_ choice about it (if you want to make market rate for your services.)
But the country and the people who could most benefit from it are more concerned with whatever fake outrage Fox News comes up with an anti woke something or the other.
So yeah, if this is the country America wants, I’m over it. I’ve done my bid.
While other people talk about leaving the country, we are seriously doing research and we are going to spend a month and a half outside of the US this year and I’ve already looked at residency requirements in a couple of countries after retirement including the one we are going to in a month and a half.
I think GP is suggesting that you're supposed to do something akin to what Ben Kenobi did while aboard the Death Star, not what he did beforehand.
This, in no way, represents my own feelings or opinion on this matter. I'm just trying to aid the conversation.
I basically did what they plan on doing. I fcked off because my country was already too far gone. But I always always make sure I will never talk positively or be in denial about the state it’s in. America isn’t there (yet). What made me snarky was the mistaken hypocrisy.
Calibrating your threat model against this attack is unlikely to give you any alpha in 2026. Hiring at tech companies and government is much less deliberate than your mental model supposes.
The current extent of background checks is an API call to Checkr. This is simply to control hiring costs.
As a heuristic, speculated information to build a threat model is unlikely to yield a helpful framework.
How could you possibly know if they use other undisclosed methods as part of the recruitment? You are assuming Palatir would behave ethically. Palantir, the company that will never win awards based on ethics
Notwithstanding the fact that tech companies hire dogshit employees all the time and the vast majority of employees of any company of size 1000+ are average at best, Palantir happens to be rating so high on the scale of evil that I'd pop champagne if it got nuked tomorrow.
If any company would do it, it would be Palantir.
Also, I’m not saying they have the best talent, just that they want the best talent.
It is impossible to prove a negative, but having strongly held beliefs without evidence is an antipattern.
Do you have any proof they don’t have a goose randomly deciding to hire you?
The lack of proof gives no credence to it actually happening
Under this conspiracy theory they'd have to be available for sale somewhere, right? Yet no journalist has ever picked up the story? Nobody has ever come out and whistleblown that their company was buying Google searches and denying applicants for searching for naughty words?
It is well documented in many many places, people just don't care.
Google can claim that it doesn’t sell your data, but if you think that the data about your searches isn't being sold, here is just a small selection of real sources.
https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-bre...
And it isn't paranoia, consumer surveillance is a very real problem, and one of the few paths to profitability for OpenAI.
https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/data-brokers-and-the-sal...
https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/data_brokers_and_sec...
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/26AmendedCompla...
https://epic.org/a-health-privacy-check-up-how-unfair-modern...
Citation needed for a claim of this magnitude.
> It is well documented in many many places, people just don't care.
Yes, please share documentation of companies buying search data and rejecting candidates for it.
Like most conspiracy theories, there are a lot of statements about this happening and being documented but the documentation never arrives.
https://www.upturn.org/work/comments-to-the-cfpb-on-data-bro...
> Most employers we examined used an ATS capable of integrating with a range of background screening vendors, including those providing social media screens, criminal background checks, credit checks, drug and health screenings, and I-9 and E-Verify.29 As applicants, however, we had no way of knowing which, if any, background check systems were used to evaluate our applications. Employers provided no meaningful feedback or explanation when an offer of work was not extended. Thus, a job candidate subjected to a background check may have no opportunity to contest the data or conclusions derived therefrom.30
If you are going to ignore a decade of research etc... I can't prove it to you.
> The agency found that data brokers routinely sidestep the FCRA by claiming they aren't subject to its requirements – even while selling the very types of sensitive personal and financial information Congress intended the law to protect.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-propo...
> Data brokers obtain information from a variety of sources, including retailers, websites and apps, newspaper and magazine publishers, and financial service providers, as well as cookies and similar technologies that gather information about consumers’ online activities. Other information is publicly available, such as criminal and civil record information maintained by federal, state, and local courts and governments, and information available on the internet, including information posted by consumers on social media.
> Data brokers analyze and package consumers’ information into reports used by creditors, insurers, landlords, employers, and others to make decisions about consumers
https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_fcra-nprm...
And that CFPB proposal was withdrawn:
https://www.consumerfinancialserviceslawmonitor.com/2025/05/...
Note screen shots of paywalled white papers from large HR orgs:
https://directorylogos.mediabrains.com/clientimages/f82ca2e3...
Image from here:
https://vendordirectory.shrm.org/company/839063/whitepapers/...
But I am betting you come back with another ad hominem, so I will stay in the real world while you ignore it, enjoy having the last word.
Every link you provided is for tangential things. They're bad, yes, but they're not google searches. Provide a link where some individual says "Yes, I know what so-and-so searched for last wednesday."
Can you answer this question without walls of unrelated text, ad hominem attacks (saying I’m in a cult), or link bombing links that don’t answer the question?
It’s a simple question. You keep insisting there’s an answer and trying to ad hominem me for not knowing it, but you consistently cannot show it.
Anyone who has worked in hiring for any big company knows how much goes into ensuring hiring processes don't accidentally touch anything that could be construed as illegal discrimination. Employees are trained, policies and procedures are documented, and anyone who even accidentally says or does anything that comes too close to possibly running afoul of hiring laws will find themselves involved with HR.
The idea that these same companies also have a group of people buying private search information or ChatGPT conversations for individual applicants from somewhere (which nobody can link to) and then secretly making hiring decisions based on what they find is silly.
The arguments come with the usual array of conspiracy theory defenses, like the "How can you prove it's not happening" or the claims that it's well documented that it's happening but nobody can link to that documentation.
For instance, if your job is to be on your feet all day and you can barely stand, then that job is not for you. I have never met employers that are so flush in opportunities of candidates that they just randomly choose to exclude certain people.
And if it's insurance, there's a group rate. The difference only variable is what the employee chooses out of your selected plans (why make a plan available if you don't want people to pick that one?) and family size. It's illegal to discriminate of family size and that does add up to 10k extra on the employer side. But there are downsides to hiring young single people, so things may balance out.
If we circumvent those privacy laws, through user licenses, or new technology - we are removing the protections of normal citizens. Therefore, the bad behavior which we already decided as a society to ban can now be perpetrated again, with perhaps a fresh new word for it to dodge said old laws.
If I understand your comment, you are essentially wondering why those old laws existed in the first place. I would suggest racism or other systemic issues, and differences in insurance premiums, are more than enough to justify the existence of privacy laws. Take a normal office job as an example over a manual labor intensive job. No reason at all that health conditions should impact that. The idea of not being hired because I have a young child, or a health condition, that would raise the group rate from the insurer passing the cost to my employer (which would be in their best interest to do) is a terrible thought. And it happened before, and we banned that practice (or did our best to do so).
All this to say, I believe HIPAA helps people, and if ChatGPT is being used to partially or fully facilitate medical decision making, they should be bound under strict laws preventing the release of that data regardless of their existing user agreements.
It’s not just medical but a broad carve out called “bona fide occupational qualifications”. If there’s a good reason for it, hiring antidiscrimination laws allow exceptions.
So less, the job requires you to stand all day, and more, once a week or so they ask you make a binder of materials, and the hole puncher they want you to use dislocates your hands (true story). Or, it's a desk job, but you can't get from your desk to the bathroom in your wheelchair unless they widen the aisles between desks (hypothetical).
Read your policy!
Insurers derive rates for each employer from each employer's costs where laws allow this. And many employers self fund medical insurance.
GDPR Request. Ah wait, regulation bad.
The continued secrecy of the conspiracy would then depend on every person involved in orchestrating this privacy violation and illegal hiring scheme keeping it secret forever. Nobody ever leaking it to the press, no disgruntled employees e-mailing their congress people, no concerned citizens slipping a screenshot to journalists. Both during and after their employment with the company.
To even make this profitable at all, the data would have to be secretly sold to a lot of companies for this use, and also continuously updated to be relevant. Giant databases of your secret ChatGPT queries being sold continuously in volume, with all employees at both the sellers, the buyers, and the users of this information all keeping it perfectly quiet, never leaking anything.
You just get an automated denial from the ATS that's based on the output from AI inference engine.
There is a vast gap between what is not legal and what is actually actionable in a court of law, which is well known to a large power nexus.
What are the chances those bills last long in the current administration and supreme court?
The US has been pretty much a free-for-all for surveillance and abusing all sorts of information, even when illegal to do so. On the rare occasions that they get caught, the penalty is almost always a handslap, and they know it.
If the person can use AI to lead a noticeably better life, something that may have been impossible previously due to economic circumstance, then the first order benefits outweigh the second order drawbacks.
I’m not disputing what you’re saying, I just think that treating it like a zero sum game every time the conversation comes up is showing an immense amount of privilege.
You, me, the parent commenter; we’re all dying, we don’t have time to optimise for the best outcome.
I know that neither health insurers nor any government agency nor anybody else have even 0,0000000000000001% as much interest in my health, well being and survival as I do.
When it is the matter of my health and my life, I care as much about what an insurer or employer thinks as I would care about what the Ayatollah of Iran thinks. Or what you think. Ie: Those opinions are without any value at all.
So if insurers can cut you off based on your ChatGPT queries or test results then you may find yourself in serious debt, homeless, without medical care, etc
Bankruptcy is of course much preferable to not having your health. Even having to argue this is bizarre. We are not human batteries in the Matrix. Our purpose is not to please institutions or destroy our own lives for fear of hypothetical situations.
Don't you understand that you only have one life and one body. That's it. You have 70 or 80 years with one body and one mind. That is the only thing which matters.
We have seen, again and again, business encroach on our quality of life and it does warrant skepticism and alertness about their motivations.
But we can have that? If you have powerful enough hardware you can do it, right now. At very least until the anti-AI people get their way and either make the models' creators liable for what the models say or get rid of the "training is fair use" thing everyone depends on, in which case, sure, you'll have to kiss legal open-weight models goodbye.
If the goal is providing subsidies (i.e. wealth transfers), then insurance is not the way to do it. That is the government’s role.
And it naturally means the people with highest premiums are the least likely to be able to afford it (the elderly, the disabled, those with chronic conditions that make them less likely to maintain high earning jobs steadily, etc)
"If I focused on my health, ate clean and exercised daily, why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
This is why there is a hyperfixation on shifting blame away from (failing) individuals. The logic breaks when Billy has to admit he just hates exercising.
And yes, before you comment, I know "maybe Billy has (condition outside all control) so it's not on him". Please, see what I just said in the previous statement.
I don't think we should play arbiter for who has and hasn't lived a healthy enough life to still believe they should get healthcare?
The battle along the spectrum of privatizing gains (lower healthcare premiums for a healthy lifestyle - high premiums for unhealthy lifestyle) vs socializing losses (paying $20/mo to get $1200/mo of care - paying $1200/mo for $0/mo of care) is constant and boundless in either direction.
On end, it's "national insurance", functionally equivalent to fully-tax-funded healthcare like the NHS or the German system with several providers competing but regulated to near identical results, but moreso as the UK and Germany also has private care; on the other, it's the absence of insurance.
Those might all seem wildly disconnected, but they all have systems of unfair allocation to compensate for unequal outcomes.
Generally national healthcare programs are entirely dependent on young healthy people paying into the system despite rarely needing it, and then hopefully enough dieing quick deaths or having multiple children to cover their costs. These rebalancing systems are artificial and humans are generally terrible at managing them.
> why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
Nobody is asking you to: enrolling in insurance is a choice in the USA.
Also, replace "chronic health conditions" with "unavoidable inherited genetic risk factors". We don't want Billy to be screwed for life just because he was born to a suboptimal combination of parents.
The choice right now is all or nothing. There is no choice for healthy people to only share a plan with other healthy people. If there was, everyone else, especially the least healthy, would be totally screwed.
1. In the US, enrolling in health insurance is currently a choice (I'm can't tell whether your hypothesis about healthy people is agreeing or disagreeing with this point).
2. We don't want Billy to be screwed for life just because he was born to a suboptimal combination of parents.
Would you mind clarifying the connection here, please?
2. >This is why there is a hyperfixation on shifting blame away from (failing) individuals. The logic breaks when Billy has to admit he just hates exercising.
I never said they shouldn't. It's just a topic totally unrelated to whether or not people are forced to buy insurance, and I'm not interested in discussing that new, unrelated topic.
> Billy has to admit he just hates exercising.
This logic breaks down when Billy actually exercises and eats just fine, but was nonetheless born to a suboptimal combination of parents.
The system can accommodate (and frankly is the ideal many people strive for) some health nut getting long drawn out cancer battle at 41. Its rare enough to be noise in the giant money payout pool.
Obesity and it's litany of health effects are not rare, and next to age, are a dominating signal drawing money from the pool.
But such a system comes at other costs that most people intuitively feel infringes on core values they have.
Edit to add: this system would actually have some great advantages over an “existing conditions” tax in that now you pay low rates until you have diabetes, all during the time you are leading the unhealthy lifestyle. But once you have it you are not rewarded for starting to exercise and eat healthy and get it under control. In the hypothetical scenario above, you’d be punished economically during the period you were building bad habits and you would be able to restore sane costs after course correction
This is difficult to convey to certain brands of self-styled libertarians.
Which we have anyway. We might as well get some benefits from it.
Then why are you not asking your insurer why they cover a lot less preventative health or other options. For example, Kaiser flat out refuses to prescribe GLP-1s for weight loss, others insurers are the same with gym subsidies or not covering nutritionists.
But they'll happily pay for your gastric bypass.
That's true for predictable costs, but not true for unpredictable ones - which is the point of most insurance (housing, car, etc). The point and use of insurance is to move risk to entities that can bear it.
Utility is non-linear with money, and so you easily have situations where spending X times more on something "costs" you more than X times if measured in how useful the money is to you.
Typically, as you have more money, each further dollar doesn't provide as much benefit as the last (sometimes things are lumpy, the difference between "not quite enough to pay rent" and "just enough to pay rent" is huge, but broadly this is true). Going from $1000 to $10000 is more impactful than $1001000 to $1010000.
That means that moving the other way, each additional dollar spent has a greater personal cost to you.
Therefore, sharing unlikely but high expenses can mean that your expected cost is the same (if there's no profit/middleman) or a bit higher, but your expected personal cost is lower.
Even the age rating factor is capped at 3, so there are also massive wealth transfers from young to old.
Mathematically, health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance premium.
AIUI the idea is to predict the "correct" price for an individual premium, Y, which is restricted to being the result of some insurance model function, f(), that is itself restricted to the domain of age (A), location (L), and smoking status (S):
Y = f(A, L, S)
But why is location useful for insurers to price premiums? I assume because healthcare has different costs in different locations, and different utilization rates: People living in coal mining towns or near oil refineries may be expected to use more healthcare and thus cost more to insure.
Thus, you can imagine insurers building a price map (like a heat map) overlay for the state/country, plotting each applicant on it, and checking the "color" there as part of their model function. So they are effectively embedding out-of-band information (prices and utilization rates for locations) into the model function f() itself.
What "AI", or large-parameter Deep Neural Networks, fundamentally change here is:
- They can approximate any effectively computable function, the same class of functions that a programmer can write and execute on a computer[0].
- They can be scaled up to an arbitrarily large number of parameters, i.e. an arbitrarily precise approximation limited only by the number of parameters and the amount and quality of model training data.
- Absolutely critically: They are programmed implicitly, through brute-force training on input-output pairs, rather than explicitly, with some programmer writing an explicit series of instructions to compute the function.
Large insurers previously had sophisticated models for f() hand-built by math whizzes, but they were limited in the amount of out-of-band information they could encode into that function by the limited cognitive and programmatic capacity of a human team.
But now with DNNs you can scalably encode unlimited out-of-band information into the function f(), while also totally obscuring how you're computing that location-based price adjustment.
The result, in extremis, is that f() is not some fancy algorithm cooked up by a few dozen math whizzes. Instead f() becomes a fancy database, allowing the tuple (A, L, S) to act merely as an index to an individualized premium Y, which defeats the entire purpose of restricting the domain of their model function.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
Given the magnificent ability of DNN models to serve as obfuscatory black boxes and the general techno-ignorance of legislators and regulators, I suspect that "AI laundering" your violations actually a very effective way to juke all sorts of laws and regulations.
But both of us are just speculating. If you have insider industry knowledge or can point to regulatory guidance and/or enforcement actions in this area that corrects or confirms my understanding, I would love to read about it.
That has not been my impression as an outside observer.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
Health insurance premiums in the US are more tax than insurance. They also have low single digit profit margins with less than desirable shareholder returns (many are non profit in the first place), so they don’t have much room to lower premiums without also reducing healthcare expenses.
The insurance business in general is very competitive and not very profitable, so an insurer that tries to collect outsized premiums will usually suffer a loss of business.
Knowing several Americans, and how much they pay for health insurance (and are still required to pay for some things "out of pocket"), this is incredible to me. And that's before you even get to the process of making a claim.
Such a broken system.
When that didn't happen, the story changed to that number being how much more premiums would have risen.
Insurance premiums have only gone up as far as I can remember, though there's a ton of variables at play here. Inflation is an obvious one, plus continual introduction of more and more costly treatments- biologic injections, cancer therapies and so forth. The unfortunate increase in obesity rates in my lifetime (along with all the health complications) has been a significant contributor as well.
It all adds up.
That was eliminated by a Republican bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Most people get insurance through their employer, and most employer plans (at medium to large companies) are self funded by the company and merely administered by insurance companies.
That means the healthy participants had no effect on those plans whatsoever. Even at peak, the individual mandate had only cut the number of uninsured by half, and the effect on rates was negligible.
An interesting thing about rising health costs is that it has happened at roughly similar rates in most first world countries for the last 50+ years.
For example in 1990 the UK, FR, and US were paying 2.0, 2.2, and 2.6 times their 1980 costs per capita. By 2000 that was 4.1, 4.1, and 4.2. By 2018 (the last year I had data for when I calculated this a few years ago) it was 10.6, 7.5, and 10.2.
Here's the 2000 to 2018 increase for those and some others: DE, FR, CA, IT, JP, UK, US were 2.1, 1.8, 2.0, 1.7, 2.6, 2.6, 2.3.
When politicians in the US talk about rising health care costs they usually put the blame on recent policies from opposing politicians. That so many first world countries with so many different health care systems all have seen similar increases for the last 50+ years suggests that it is due to something they all have in common and that government policy doesn't affect it much.
Prices were always going to increase.
baggage fees,
or lack of WiFi,
on, say, Spirit Airlines.
You looked at the list of insurers/jobs offering health insurance carriers,
selected the cheapest, or second-cheapest option,
and you’re surprised they’re harder to work with?
How?
Even in tech spaces with money to throw around, that just means that maybe your partner and dependent's premiums will be covered/negligible, or that your deductible will be low.
You're still going to be fucked by their policies, though.
Pay me enough in cash to secure my own wellness with whatever organizations I choose, or: next, please.
Absolutely not. They inflate prices by 200% and then give you 20% "savings" back. The whole idea of a health insurance company as publicly traded corporation is totally insane. They are designed to extract maximum profit from wherever they can get. The is no incentive to save money for patients. Any savings go to shareholders.
If your claims were true, then the publicly traded businesses would have no customers.
Yeah. And they all ultimately have to be paid by my health premiums.
When I visit my parents, and they have the TV on, and I see 3 90-second advertisments for prescription drugs every single commercial break, I remind myself that, no matter what, we have to keep funding these commercials. Whatever the US decides to do for healthcare, I guarantee these commercials will continue to be paid for.
I also guarantee that pharmacy company executives, and insurance company executives will continue to make millions of dollars a year. We have to keep paying them as well.
The huge bureaucracy of insurance workers who decide what is and isn't approved, that all will have to be paid for as well.
I used to work for a company that did background checks on doctors, we had different customers in every state, every state had their own companies and their own system for maintaining and verifying doctors licenses. These different companies in each state have to be paid. I made good money as a programmer doing background checks for these various companies and my paycheck also ultimately came from your medical premiums.
I think we need to stop and appreciate the patriotic duty we all have to pay high premiums and medical costs, because every time we do we're propping up a huge portion of US workers. -- Just kidding. The truth is a lot of companies need to go out of business before things get cheaper.