Thiel claims to despise "massive privacy violations" on the part of groups like Gawker, yet he was one of the co-founders of Palantir. These people are just narcissists who want revenge for someone splashing mud on their boots. They're not fighting for our privacy, or for the common good. Sorry buddy, you are worth more than 99.999% of us. That makes you a significant figure and thus newsworthy. Your sexual orientation gives people some insight into whether you would support a certain political party, activists groups, etc. I'm just astonished at the tone deafness of this guy's comments.
Just because you are rich or influential doesn't mean you don't get a right to privacy. If people want to know his stance on being gay, ask him. At what dollar figure do you lose these rights exactly? Why should your sexual orientation matter more than your words or actions?
I think Hacker News users can expect to be held to a higher standard than this comment, which adds no information, calls a lot of names ("these people are just narcissists who want revenge"—you can't possibly know that), and lacks decency (someone's sexual orientation is fair game because they're rich? no, it's not). If you have an argument to make, you're welcome to make it neutrally and respectfully. But you're not welcome to spew rage here, popular though it is.
The above is not a defense of Thiel, Palantir, or narcissists, whoever those are.
Palantir's (and Facebook's and numerous other "social", adtech, and other current-wave tech companies) roles in depriving individuals of privacy, particularly in contrast with Thiel's actions, goals, and methods here, absolutely bear airing.
I've no love for Gawker at all, I've blocked most of the related properties as not worth the bits. But Thiel's actions here are deeply troubling. In large part for precisely the hypocrisy your parent post notes.
(It'd be nice if HN showed more than just the immediate parent post in the compose page).
I can't speak for the other commenter or for other countries, but in the U.S., being "extremely wealthy", to the point where you've become a public figure, changes the standard of privacy and slander in the eyes of the court:
> New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that established the actual malice standard, which has to be met before press reports about public officials can be considered to be defamation and libel; and hence allowed free reporting of the civil rights campaigns in the southern United States. It is one of the key decisions supporting the freedom of the press. The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case, if he is a "public figure", prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the extremely high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and the difficulty of proving the defendant's knowledge and intentions, such cases—but only when they involve public figures—rarely prevail.
As it's taught in journalism schools, this precedent is seen as the major driver of American press freedom.
Doing a little googling, it looks like Palantir is a somewhat suspicious cyber-spying company implicated in a number of dragnet espionage programs. For instance, China's espionage program used, in part, for political oppression in Tibet. It also looks like he distanced himself from an effort to use his software to try to take down Wikileaks. I'm not entirely sure what sorts of things Palantir really does and if I'd consider them ethical or anti-privacy, but it does seem like a point of concern and probably what the person above you was referencing.
Can't speak for nefitty (because I disagree with the parent comment) however wealth imho does imply a lower expectation of privacy since with wealth more of your private activities become a matter of public interest.
That said, I don't see why Thiel's homosexuality would be newsworthy nor why Hulk Hogan's sex tape is newsworthy (the racist rant was, but they didn't publish that)
> but are you suggesting that being extremely wealthy is reason enough to give up on privacy?
Well not in the strawman form of 'give up on privacy' - but yes, if the information may be of public interest (I definitely don't think that sex-tapes are fyi) - than the legal standards are different.
There's no evidence that this is motivated by his own "outing" as gay. It's not as if he was concealing it, and he's smart enough to have known that it would become public knowledge as his profile grew.
As he says in this interview, he's big and powerful enough to defend himself.
What he's fighting is the practice of destroying the reputations or lives of people who don't have the power to defend themselves, and claiming "free speech" as a justification for operating without any sense of morality and compassion.
