I'm calling people insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to use orbital weapons to assassinate people, as commenters in this thread are doing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536467 are indeed borderline Q anon.
Also, I don't see anything in your link that contradicts the fact that governments' data remains in the custody of the government, not Palantir.
Q anon was wrong about the details but at a high level a lot of it was confirmed by the Epstein files.
Peter Thiel shows up A LOT in those files. I don’t think it’s out of the question that he would use palantir’s data to assassinate people.
That linked thread doesn’t support your argument. Re-read it.
This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes; if a company is concerned with privacy should think twice before handling it to Palantir, even if with all the assurances they might give in terms of data governance.
> This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes;
You realize that this is not mutually exclusive with what I just wrote?
Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.
Heh, the fact that they aren’t mutually exclusive is the problem. Why give someone with mass surveillance ops in other domains access to yet another domain?
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Even if Palantir only "processes" the data you have to assume they are making their own copies of it if they want to
It's not like tech companies deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trust anymore, if they ever did
> Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.
How is that possible if Palantir software runs on machines Palantir controls?
1. on prem
2. extremely strict data controls, if one of palantirs big customers found out data got leaked people are going to prison
Amen.
People seem to struggle with the concept of private datacenters these days. Palantir customers tend to be the sorts of orgs that are pretty paranoid about their data, and they wouldn't be handing it over to some schmucks without being confident that those concerns were addressed. Militaries and governments generally aren't fuckin around with things like intelligence data, so I think it's reasonable that Palantir is able to make a convincing case to the world's most paranoid orgs that their data isn't being sent anywhere (and it'd likely be air gapped anyway).
Just because everything you touch is in the cloud doesn't mean other orgs aren't still building their own datacenters and then buying software to run inside.
You think people go to prison for this sort of thing? How laughably quaint.
yes
am close with a few employees there
The on prem solution is probably 2X TCO of the hosted solution. I'm sure many orgs that should be strictly "on prem" are running hosted solutions due to budgetary concerns.
This is like saying a Swiss bank would share your secrets because shady people use Swiss banks. No. Confidentiality is literally built into their business model. Getting caught sharing customer data is one of the fastest ways for their business to crumble.
Being a customer of a bank and being in a Palantir dataset is not the same. The people in the data are not the customers of Palantir.
How many times are we gonna have to see businesses get caught sharing customer data before we learn to not just trust them?
What software from what companies do you use to store your personal data?
I’m sorry what? Confidentiality is built into palantirs business model? Do you even know who Palantir is? Your analogy makes zero sense
What’s up with all these Palantir shills in this thread
How does it not make sense? Companies all over the world trust their proprietary data with Palantir platforms. There’s no way they would do this if they thought Palantir was actually sharing data without their approval. If they were found out to have done this, companies would cease to trust Palantir and stop working with them
Palantirs main function is collecting massive amounts of data and mining it.
You and all the trolls in this thread can keep playing dumb
According to the article:
> It also includes a line stating that with permission from the city agency, Palantir can “de-identify” patients’ protected health information and use it for “purposes other than research”.
Under HIPPA, "research" has a very specific definition which renders "purposes other than research" quite broad. Yes, it's "with permission" but it does depend on the city agency fully understanding what ancillary things Palantir can do with de-identified data once it has left the covered entity and without further explicit permission.
while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...
And 365 (I'm sure there is an on-premises version, but when not).
I really have never heard of on prem 365 deployments, I think any confidentiality is handled via contracted promises with legal ramifications for breaking. With Azure GovCloud for instance there’s no encryption / user key custody on the one drive side, everything you do is uploaded to Microsoft and they maintain keys, they just hire people who passed a background check to run the infrastructure, US nationals only etc
There is on prem office.
Government and 365 is weird.
Non-military entities use “Government Community Cloud”, which is an environment where data is stored in segmented areas of Microsoft data centers, but everything else is on commercial infrastructure.
You absolutely can host keys as a customer.
The Microsoft approach to all of this stuff is insane.
Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it's use.
How do I decline it?? I keep clicking no, hide, not interested, cancel, etc. but it keeps showing up and activating...if I had a nickel for every time I clicked it on accident in Azure because a layout shift moved it under my mouse when trying to press a button I would have a lot of nickels. It even showed up as an app on my phone because I guess the Office 365 entry got hijacked...
Your Entra Admin like your Google workspace admin can publish or remove features from user availability.
Not for org/enterprise licenses.
There is virtually no consequences or accountability when big-tech companies share private data. For crying out loud, they were caught red handed sharing private data from their EU endeavors.
If even sovereign states with clear laws forbidding such behavior can't keep those companies in check, no enterprise/b2b can.
It’s named evil corp. On purpose.
> Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data
After DOGE, a movement Palantir aided [1], I think it's fair for folks to wonder to what degree these firms have been infiltrated by extremists. Someone who will convince themselves that exporting data to ICE or the Proud Boys—like the names of every New Yorker whose medical records say they are gay, circumcised or have had an abortion—is the right thing to do. (Or at least funny and inconsequential.)
It's a risk. Not a conclusion. But given Palantir's offering is becoming less differentiated by the day, I think it's fair for people to look for alternatives.
I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.
They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.
In fairness to Microsoft, when the XLS file format was first defined about 40 years ago all of their competitors also used proprietary file formats. Back then open file formats for complex, structured data weren't really a thing. I suppose in theory they could have used SGML but that wouldn't have been very practical given the severely limited hardware resources at the time.
People should not use proprietary formats for obvious reasons, but XLS has been largely reverse engineered.
Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.
They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk.
The concern is more with the tools that Palantir creates around the domains they service. They analyze, predict, and shape decisions using unproven technology. Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes, and given the anti-democratic and frankly unhinged extremist worldviews of the founders, it's highly concerning to allow them to create tools for sensitive and nuanced data that have life or death consequences.
> Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes,
No, Palantir's customers are the ones gleaning insights. To re-use the Excel analogy, this is like saying Microsoft is controlling insights and outcomes because organization use Excel.
Palantir's products are not Excel. Palantir's founders and executives are well aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.
As far as I know, Microsoft executives don't brag about Excel being used to create a unified "kill chain" [1], nor do they market software intended for targeting for weapons of mass destruction [2], nor do they claim that their products are designed for use in lethal military operations [3].
As much as you'd like to hand-waive away their role, a war profiteer is a war profiteer. IBM also used to just make computers to manage supply chains in WW2; who they sold it to, the purposes it was used for, and why they sold it is still important. Based on interviews, Thiel and Karp are gleeful about their role in the military-industrial complex and embrace it [4], so likening their products to Excel is disingenuous at best.
But wouldn't all of that apply to Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Motors, Colt, Browning, and countless more companies that don't just build software for the military but actual weaponry? Yet those companies don't receive even a fraction of the hate that Palantir does.
Many people (myself included) have a lot to say about those companies as well. But their existence doesn't excuse Palantir, the company at the focus of the article that we're discussing in this thread. We're on a tech-focused forum which is probably why you hear more about tech-first companies here like Palantir and Anduril than "legacy" weapons manufacturers.
if custody is with the customer.....why does palantir have compute pricing.....
hmmmmmm
Why would anyone knowingly use Isreali spyware?
> Custody of the data remains with the customer.
Yea.. like.. how, though?
Here are their setup instructions. It seems pretty clear what is happening to your data, and an unqualified statement that you maintain some nebulous idea of "custody" seems oblivious to even simple risk.
This isn't even getting into their "forward deployed software engineers" or how that whole aspect of their "product" works.
You can run it on-prem, where you can actually technologically enforce data custody.
Custody enforcement using the cloud hosted product, is mostly contractual, although they do offer some technical features, like encrypting all data using a AWS KMS key in the customer's AWS account.
Still, this relies on trusting that they won't make their own separate copies of the data.
> Custody of the data remains with the customer
pinky promise?
Well, they are to some degree.
Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so' (theregister.com)
76 points by fauigerzigerk 6 months ago | 7 comments
In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.
That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all
Most Epic products aggressively isolate data. The majority of instances are run on-premises, and even those hosted on cloud platforms are single-tenant. They have a good record for data security and privacy; afaik all Epic data breaches were actually caused by infiltration of other customer systems.
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No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate. I can get being politically opposed to the conservative politics of some of its founders, but the vast majority of conservative-founded companies don't get nearly as much criticism. A lot of it is seriously borderline Q-anon levels of conspiratorial talk. Just look at the comment in this thread insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to assassinate people with orbital weapons.
The people controlling Palantir are openly anti-democratic. They see technology as a means of controlling and ruling the common folk. They said so, repeatedly, in public, of their own volition.
Can you point to where they have said so? The only one that comes to mind is Thiel's quote from 2009 about democracy being incompatible worth freedom (the populace will vote to remove freedoms, e.g. try to ban AI or other technological advances and whatnot). But pointing out flaws in democracy is a far cry from actual wanting to get rid of democracy.
If he's stated an actual intent to end democracy in the US, it'd be good to cite that.
His vision of statehood is autocratic in that he emphasises efficiency and progress which can only be achieved via a CEO-like government. Please watch the interview with Joe Rogan.
The only quote from Thiel in that piece is the same "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" I wrote about in my comment.
Alex Karp is a deeply unlikable human who talks about how his software is used to kill people, and that he wants to drop a lot of fentanyl-laced urine across all the negative reporters.
Also he has stated that critics should be sprayed with fentanyl laced urine.
Why should we feel good about him running any company.
Do you think there are zero people on earth who need to be killed?
Certainly we do not need to make those decisions based on fuzzy vector search, probably how the opening salvo of the Iran war ended up killing a hundred school girls
Hating Palantir without having any idea of what they are is the trendy thing to do. Their leaders are toxic which doesn’t help the case, but the core issue really is just that in this political climate, people all over the western world don’t trust their governments, and it’s also trendy to distrust anyone making money, as well as tech companies - especially those involved in data and AI related businesses - so the fact that Palantir makes these distrusted actors more competent while making money doing it, is seen as siding with the devil.
So it’s a trust problem, if the government were seen as effective and worthy then I want them to be effective, which includes using the data they collect effectively. In this climate trendy people would prefer that their corrupt government is also fully incompetent to limit the effect of the corruption.
Their founder is a lunatic giving a lecture tour about the anti-Christ and the need to move beyond national-states. The CEO is on some bizarre PR tour where he comes off like a Bond villain.
It’s obvious all your questions are not authentic and you have a motive and this thread is clearly being astroturfed but I will entertain.
They build immigrant databases and help ICE (a corrupt agency performing illegal, unethical and unamerican agenda) find people to deport.
Hopefully people here can see past this aloof act you’ve got going on.
Responses like these are a big part of what convinces me that the hysteria around Palantir is unfounded. I see broad claims about how the company is violating privacy, going to overthrow democracy, etc. but when pushed for details, most people just fall back on basic partisanship.
Sure bud keep playing dumb
Hope the compensation is worth being a bottom feeder
This reminds of back when DOGE was doing its rounds and all of sudden there were waves of posts with the same tone making the same argument.
Your point is well taken, though it's worth pointing out that literally yesterday Palantir was co-awarded a contract for building orbital weapons systems [0].
The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:
- access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos
- its chairman's specific pro-authoritarian mission (so pointedly so that the Catholic Church felt the need to make a specific rebuke a few days ago [1])
- a regulatory environment in which its monetary risks are arguably minimized if it takes the broadest possible reading of e.g. HIPAA's law enforcement exceptions that mention "written administrative requests" [2]
- documented concerns about governance [3]
Those concerned with this confluence are far from conspiracy theorists, and may be quite rationally interested in protecting e.g. the public reputation of their hospital networks, and ability to service - to say nothing of their desire to protect the privacy of their patients.
Have you considered that a weapons platform like that could be necessary? Or are you just opposed to Palantir being part of it.
This comment is written in an interesting way. If it's unnecessary, the OP's comment is fine. If the platform is "necessary" in some abstract sense, you've avoided articulating that argument by putting the burden back on OP to justify their position.
That seems like an interesting discussion though. Why would it be necessary?
There's ample evidence that medium range ballistic missile technology is proliferating, fired from land based systems. It is difficult to intercept these with ground-based launchers. But, if incepting from orbit the probability you score a hit is higher. The catch is that it is a) extremely complex, and b) very expensive to develop and implement a system like this. Enter Palantir and Anduril.
The weight of this argument rests on how much you care about being in range of MRBMs, how likely you think it is that MRBMs will be a decisive factor in a future conflict, and whether or not you want the United States to be victorious in this potential conflict. Many people do not care about this threat, don't think MRBMs will matter, and/or want the United States to lose. I am not one of those people.
I think that three things can simultaneously be true:
(1) missile defense systems based on deep data fusion with cutting-edge espionage systems for launch detection are becoming increasingly useful and necessary
(2) we should be thoughtful that these types of espionage fusion systems could also be used for domestic surveillance, and advocate for close scrutiny and oversight of these systems
(3) a healthcare administrator can make a rational argument that their patient information should not be handled by the same company building those espionage-advised data fusion systems... lest the close relationship with government quietly transform into unauthorized data sharing with other government actors, without clear paths towards legal recourse if this were to occur, and with potentially irrevocable consequences for patients
"bars states party to the treaty from placing weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise stationing them in outer space"
but 1. today's sentiment is: to hell with these treaties-schmeaties, and 2. what you mentioned is not yet a weapon of _mass_ destruction, so we're all good!
Claiming a particular weapons system is “necessary” is war brained. There are other ways of survival besides bombing the shit out of each other.
True, I am partial to battle drill 1A.
> The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:
> - access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos
Do you have evidence that Palantir itself - not customers using Palantir software - has access to this data?
I think you are maybe reading into the initial claim too much and not hearing the follow ups. There are two things here: 1. the overall character, broad charter, and people that compose the company, and 2. the theory that it is a specific agent in illegal or harmful data trafficking. And sure, I think we can take 2 away completely here if we simply must assume good faith from these guys and the contracts that they make, but that still kinda leaves 1 which is pretty big. Like 1 answers your follow up question of why everyone hates them either way, but you still are countering it by trying to ask what it has to do with 2. If that makes sense?
And really, I don't think anyone wants to "oh sweet summer child" you in your doubts here, but it's really extremely hard to not want to just... gesture around the world right now and ask why you still believe in some kind of sanctity or infallibility of something like the legal contract or other various forms of de jure "accountability" when it comes to tech companies, especially one as big as this.
This pattern in which people make claims about Palantir having access to private information, then retreat back to something along the lines of "I don't like the character of the company" is exactly the kind of thing that leads me to believe people don't actually have tangible complaints with the company.
This is true, but Palantir also describes what they do in a way that is going to cause skepticism and confusion. When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.
> When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.
This is basically saying you have the same DB schema on your dev environment as you do on prod. If anyone made that kind leap in logic, I would conclude they have little to no technical know how.
Oh, I agree with you. Perhaps I should've said "one could forgive a journalist ...", who tend to not be familiar with these things.
Saying they have ‘conservative values’ is the death blow to conservativism, given their explicit anti-democratic, and fundamentally extremist leadership
Look into Peter Thiel, the current administration and how it all ties back to Palantir. No conspirations here, just openly known facts.
What are those openly known facts?
>No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate.
Mostly because hating Palantir is a trendy leftist virtue signal. Defund ICE being another one. Defund the police was trendy five years ago, but is no longer popular.
Why are so many entities dealing with Palantir? They are a poison pill for customers.
Palantir is a glorified IT consulting company. You tell them "I want a system to manage patient records" and they will dispatch a team of engineers fresh out of college to build it for you while charging top dollar. They are able to get government & military contracts because of lobbying and influence, but generally everything you see about them online is marketing.
Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting company...
Cambridge Analytica was much more successful as a marketing company, vastly overstating their influence and impact
They don't need marketing. It's very well known what they do and for whom they work.
I always tell people this - that Palantir is just IBM. Instant hate feedbacks from both left and right.
Left: They kill babies and have your poop data.
Right: They are so much more than that. That have super intelligence AI with drone puppetry. Have you seen the leaked dashboards!
Is IBM really the company we want to hold up as a moral standard?
They deliver on contracts or else they wouldn’t keep getting them
They don't have in-house talent to implement what they want. The same reasons they used to hire Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC. Palantir is one rung up from those places when it comes to talent/ability to deliver.
+1. Think of it like a consulting shop that can deliver customized software instead of just slide decks and excel workbooks.
Which customers? Outside of the HN bubble, very few consumers know or care which entities are using Palantir.
With the controversial contracts they already have with the US, I think they had enough and should keep it that way...
Just saying.
Palantir is an AI firm now? Thought it was a data collection/spyware firm.
spyware
Why is Palantir a spyware company, but Snowflake or Databricks are not? "Spyware" has an actual definition, and there are real companies that sell it, like Pegasus. It's not some catch-all term for what people call "evil".
If they're not a spyware company then they really super duper picked the wrong name. Maybe they were just going for evil, in which case ... well I'm glad NYC hospitals have dropped them and I hope many, many more companies and organizations choose the same path.
The point is why are they suddenly an "AI" firm, not to debate the fine meanings of spyware.
Are the other spyware companies that you mention in your post also rebranding as "AI" firms?
I like to think of Palantir as JIRA or salesforce for killing people.
All AI companies are spyware companies.
> Palantir is an AI firm now?
Of course. Everyone is an AI firm now.
Sending the vampire away after he drank his fill is better than nothing, even if it's too little too late.
Dear UK government, keep Palantir the hell away from my data.
when private company is deeply embedded in public health systems it is just dangerous
I’m confused. Who do you think makes all the medical equipment like CT scans, MRIs, etc. because it’s sure not the government
Private companies are embedded in every healthcare system in the world, even public ones.
I'm talking about the extent of a single company's influence
NYC schools just passed some AI guidelines as well. No training on student PII data, no final grades, etc. Unfortunately that's a pinprick for the behemoth.
Palantir is the most evil company nowadays.
Palantir can install a data backdoor at anytime with their software. If you haven't noticed that businesses are openly violating data privacy you aren't paying attention. I don't have trust in our judicial system if Trump pardons criminals everyday.
J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel's Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.
A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.
I'd be concerned if any of the parties involved were halfway competent. This is a grift for taxpayer dollars, nothing more.
Oh cool. All is well.
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I think he is implying that their enterprise contracts are all on prem and airgapped? Seems unlikely to me they do that for all their customers but they likely do for the government ones anyway.
It's not necessarily airgapped but yes. Air gapping is a bit much for hospital data, which after all does have to be readily accessible to the people working at the hospital or group of hospitals.
> Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics
They work with law enforcement agencies and help them process data they legally collect into other government databases. Their main product is merging data from various databases and adding a UI layer for analysis.
Basically, Palantir is a data integration company that works for government and larges businesses under contract. Some data they get hired to work on includes surveillance data and military intelligence collection.
Main product is good PR.
Main product is sales tactics.
> ah? Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics (from the above article contract). The base necessity for doing this work is... data, and the data is somewhere, stored.
It's on prem at the customer.
I know nothing about palantir in particular but typically these software stacks have a bunch of random crap in them to deal with fetching data from other system's the customer has.
There's a bizarre conspiracy going around that Palantir is some all-seeing force in the world trying to turn everyone into mindless drones. In reality, it's just a company that—like it or not—has been relatively successful at securing massive contracts with the government and major corporations.
In a healthcare context, internal pricing and patient data are heavily protected by law. If Palantir were as guilty of surveilling your medical data as you allege, that would be tremendously illegal, and companies much larger and more influential would have strong legal grounds to sue it into oblivion. If you think Palantir has a tight grip on the government, consider the influence of the health systems it works with—some of which are the largest employers in their states. The idea that an all-powerful company can control the government doesn’t make sense if smaller companies, which donate less, are somehow exerting unchecked control over larger ones.
Of course, most of these concerns stem from two things: (1) its approach to autonomous warfare and (2) concerns about immigration surveillance. Autonomous warfare is coming, whether you like it or not. Palantir’s role in that is not related to its work in the commercial sector—unless you're suggesting they’re holding back potential revenue by not selling highly advanced robotics to corporate clients. Concerns about immigration surveillance are also somewhat overstated because, again, Palantir legally cannot use data from its commercial work (unless one of its clients severely mismanaged their contract). In that case, it’s really the U.S. government you should be criticizing — not the contractor simply trying to make money.
The law is generally a bad proxy for whether or not society approves of xyz commercial behavior
I don't think people are accusing Palantir of criminally misusing the data. The government rewrites the laws around what these analytics firms are capable of, and as such Palantir operates in that space. Whether or not it's "illegal" doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is creepy Big Brother shit.
Also bullshit that they don't store data.
>Like it or not, there really isn't any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work Palantir
That’s only making European entrepreneurs salivate at all of that sweet EU funding they can suck up to replicate PLTR in service of their sovereignty initiatives.
Europe is currently lagging on the cloud front, the AI front and even the SaaS front. They can't even wean themselves off of MS Office ffs, after all the shenanigans Microsoft and the US have pulled against them. I have no hopes of the EU building anything that can replicate even 25% of Palantir.
They only have to replicate Palantir marketing and garnish it with a bit of nationalism. Not like the government is good at getting its money's worth in the end.
Trust me, they can't even do that.
And not forget hardware. All they have is meaningless leaders with zero vision. My dumb AI claw tool has better view of the world than they do. They might as well be replaced by those AI agents. Probably better outcome that current
"controversial"
Everyone knows what's going on, but also everyone is too afraid to stand up for some reason.
What is going on?
Their main product is just consulting and PowerBI but for government. So much hysteria online!
Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy
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Thiel is pro-dictatorship as near as one can tell. Karp probably isn’t sane enough to evaluate
Hysteria? Have you listened to Karp? Palantir pushes some pretty shit-tier BI noise to clueless executives (it's actually uproarious the mythology that has built around that company), and this weird creep talks like they're the masters of the universe.
Thiel is another incredibly bizarre creep, and he sits as the chairman of the board. Both are very tightly associated with the Trump crime syndicate and the US government, which increasingly is the world's #1 threat, and should be treated as equally dangerous.
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The US is undisputedly the world's #1 threat. Like who do you think is even in the running?
Massive military that has bombed ten or so countries in the past year, overthrown a couple more, threatened close allies such that they're getting blood supplies ready and bombs to remove runways. Enormous nuclear arsenal, all in the hands of self-dealing criminal halfwit pathological liar with malignant narcissism as the country flushes down the toilet. A "Department of War" leader who is a simpleton alcoholic clown who rails off "give me tough guy speeches" that he got from ChatGPT, gloating about blatantly illegal -- both in international and US laws -- war crimes, including murdering people in boats just by rebranding them "narco terrorists". A governing party that increasingly is stocked with INSANE fundy nuts who declare that global warming isn't real because the bible didn't mention it, and who salivate about unleashing armageddon. The country is basically lawless at this point -- a busted plutocracy -- and the securities industry has become farcical it is filled with such grift and absolute lawless fraud.
No one holds a candle to that dangerous nuthouse. North Korea, China, Russia...no one is an iota of a danger that the rogue, war-criming United States of America is.
And the "best" part is that we're entering the era of the worst nuclear proliferation in history because of the utter insanity we've seen in the US. I suspect many "own the libs" Americans aren't going to like what inevitably comes next.
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Uh...what? Do you know what an ad hominem is? Bizarre.
I directly described the United States of America as it is today. This is just fact, and to the entire rest of the world, America is a busted idiocracy that represents by far the greatest threat to world peace.
EDIT: Oh forgot to mention that the US is directly and openly involved in political interference in many of its allies. Alberta in Canada is a target of a massive US operation right now. Just about every European country. Which is pretty ironic given that the US is basically a fractured pseudo-country where one half of the country hates the other half, and that by all rights should be split up.
Boy, with friends like these, we'll all hope that China's nukes hit their marks with good accuracy.
Yeah ad hominem means to the person in latin.
The people literally are the position. They wield absolute, unchecked power over the might of the US government. What a bizarre thing to complain about.
Trump could literally end humanity tonight. You understand that, right? This proud-he-passed-a-dementia-test serial liar, felonious rapist was given absolutely, unquestioned control over the world's largest nuclear arsenal by the US public. Utter insanity.
Trump and FoxNews Hegseth could send the enormous US military -- screw good healthcare or education, you've got invisible planes! -- to invade Greenland or Canada or Spain. Tonight. With zero opposition.
There are zero checks or restraints on this criminal empire, and the world is seeing the results. It started internally, and that was a spectacular disaster (lol $2T deficit and spiralling economy) so now it's on to the next distraction after the other. Iran didn't give the boost he hoped for, so wonder what the next target will be. Panama? Cuba? Oh I hear they have the "Shield of the Americas" now and think they have Manifest Destiny over the entire Western Hemisphere.
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How perfectly on brand.
This thread is being astroturfed and trolled. Don’t take it to heart
It seems like letting a company like Palantir anywhere near private medical data is a pretty bad idea. I am happy NYC is doing this.
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You’re calling people who critique Palantir “borderline Q-Anon” ?
While you yourself think Palantir’s products are “like Excel” ?
They are not. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
I'm calling people insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to use orbital weapons to assassinate people, as commenters in this thread are doing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536467 are indeed borderline Q anon.
Also, I don't see anything in your link that contradicts the fact that governments' data remains in the custody of the government, not Palantir.
Q anon was wrong about the details but at a high level a lot of it was confirmed by the Epstein files.
Peter Thiel shows up A LOT in those files. I don’t think it’s out of the question that he would use palantir’s data to assassinate people.
That linked thread doesn’t support your argument. Re-read it.
This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes; if a company is concerned with privacy should think twice before handling it to Palantir, even if with all the assurances they might give in terms of data governance.
> This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes;
You realize that this is not mutually exclusive with what I just wrote?
Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.
Heh, the fact that they aren’t mutually exclusive is the problem. Why give someone with mass surveillance ops in other domains access to yet another domain?
Even if Palantir only "processes" the data you have to assume they are making their own copies of it if they want to
It's not like tech companies deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trust anymore, if they ever did
> Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.
How is that possible if Palantir software runs on machines Palantir controls?
1. on prem 2. extremely strict data controls, if one of palantirs big customers found out data got leaked people are going to prison
Amen.
People seem to struggle with the concept of private datacenters these days. Palantir customers tend to be the sorts of orgs that are pretty paranoid about their data, and they wouldn't be handing it over to some schmucks without being confident that those concerns were addressed. Militaries and governments generally aren't fuckin around with things like intelligence data, so I think it's reasonable that Palantir is able to make a convincing case to the world's most paranoid orgs that their data isn't being sent anywhere (and it'd likely be air gapped anyway).
Just because everything you touch is in the cloud doesn't mean other orgs aren't still building their own datacenters and then buying software to run inside.
You think people go to prison for this sort of thing? How laughably quaint.
yes
am close with a few employees there
The on prem solution is probably 2X TCO of the hosted solution. I'm sure many orgs that should be strictly "on prem" are running hosted solutions due to budgetary concerns.
This is like saying a Swiss bank would share your secrets because shady people use Swiss banks. No. Confidentiality is literally built into their business model. Getting caught sharing customer data is one of the fastest ways for their business to crumble.
Being a customer of a bank and being in a Palantir dataset is not the same. The people in the data are not the customers of Palantir.
How many times are we gonna have to see businesses get caught sharing customer data before we learn to not just trust them?
What software from what companies do you use to store your personal data?
I’m sorry what? Confidentiality is built into palantirs business model? Do you even know who Palantir is? Your analogy makes zero sense
What’s up with all these Palantir shills in this thread
How does it not make sense? Companies all over the world trust their proprietary data with Palantir platforms. There’s no way they would do this if they thought Palantir was actually sharing data without their approval. If they were found out to have done this, companies would cease to trust Palantir and stop working with them
Palantirs main function is collecting massive amounts of data and mining it.
You and all the trolls in this thread can keep playing dumb
According to the article:
> It also includes a line stating that with permission from the city agency, Palantir can “de-identify” patients’ protected health information and use it for “purposes other than research”.
Under HIPPA, "research" has a very specific definition which renders "purposes other than research" quite broad. Yes, it's "with permission" but it does depend on the city agency fully understanding what ancillary things Palantir can do with de-identified data once it has left the covered entity and without further explicit permission.
while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...
And 365 (I'm sure there is an on-premises version, but when not).
I really have never heard of on prem 365 deployments, I think any confidentiality is handled via contracted promises with legal ramifications for breaking. With Azure GovCloud for instance there’s no encryption / user key custody on the one drive side, everything you do is uploaded to Microsoft and they maintain keys, they just hire people who passed a background check to run the infrastructure, US nationals only etc
There is on prem office.
Government and 365 is weird.
Non-military entities use “Government Community Cloud”, which is an environment where data is stored in segmented areas of Microsoft data centers, but everything else is on commercial infrastructure.
You absolutely can host keys as a customer.
The Microsoft approach to all of this stuff is insane.
Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it's use.
How do I decline it?? I keep clicking no, hide, not interested, cancel, etc. but it keeps showing up and activating...if I had a nickel for every time I clicked it on accident in Azure because a layout shift moved it under my mouse when trying to press a button I would have a lot of nickels. It even showed up as an app on my phone because I guess the Office 365 entry got hijacked...
Your Entra Admin like your Google workspace admin can publish or remove features from user availability.
Not for org/enterprise licenses.
There is virtually no consequences or accountability when big-tech companies share private data. For crying out loud, they were caught red handed sharing private data from their EU endeavors.
If even sovereign states with clear laws forbidding such behavior can't keep those companies in check, no enterprise/b2b can.
It’s named evil corp. On purpose.
> Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data
After DOGE, a movement Palantir aided [1], I think it's fair for folks to wonder to what degree these firms have been infiltrated by extremists. Someone who will convince themselves that exporting data to ICE or the Proud Boys—like the names of every New Yorker whose medical records say they are gay, circumcised or have had an abortion—is the right thing to do. (Or at least funny and inconsequential.)
It's a risk. Not a conclusion. But given Palantir's offering is becoming less differentiated by the day, I think it's fair for people to look for alternatives.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-doge-irs-mega-api-data/
I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.
They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.
In fairness to Microsoft, when the XLS file format was first defined about 40 years ago all of their competitors also used proprietary file formats. Back then open file formats for complex, structured data weren't really a thing. I suppose in theory they could have used SGML but that wouldn't have been very practical given the severely limited hardware resources at the time.
People should not use proprietary formats for obvious reasons, but XLS has been largely reverse engineered.
Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.
They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-os...
The concern is more with the tools that Palantir creates around the domains they service. They analyze, predict, and shape decisions using unproven technology. Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes, and given the anti-democratic and frankly unhinged extremist worldviews of the founders, it's highly concerning to allow them to create tools for sensitive and nuanced data that have life or death consequences.
> Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes,
No, Palantir's customers are the ones gleaning insights. To re-use the Excel analogy, this is like saying Microsoft is controlling insights and outcomes because organization use Excel.
Palantir's products are not Excel. Palantir's founders and executives are well aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.
As far as I know, Microsoft executives don't brag about Excel being used to create a unified "kill chain" [1], nor do they market software intended for targeting for weapons of mass destruction [2], nor do they claim that their products are designed for use in lethal military operations [3].
As much as you'd like to hand-waive away their role, a war profiteer is a war profiteer. IBM also used to just make computers to manage supply chains in WW2; who they sold it to, the purposes it was used for, and why they sold it is still important. Based on interviews, Thiel and Karp are gleeful about their role in the military-industrial complex and embrace it [4], so likening their products to Excel is disingenuous at best.
[1] https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
[3] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Palantir-defends-its-role-in-th...
[4] https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes
But wouldn't all of that apply to Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Motors, Colt, Browning, and countless more companies that don't just build software for the military but actual weaponry? Yet those companies don't receive even a fraction of the hate that Palantir does.
Many people (myself included) have a lot to say about those companies as well. But their existence doesn't excuse Palantir, the company at the focus of the article that we're discussing in this thread. We're on a tech-focused forum which is probably why you hear more about tech-first companies here like Palantir and Anduril than "legacy" weapons manufacturers.
if custody is with the customer.....why does palantir have compute pricing.....
hmmmmmm
Why would anyone knowingly use Isreali spyware?
> Custody of the data remains with the customer.
Yea.. like.. how, though?
Here are their setup instructions. It seems pretty clear what is happening to your data, and an unqualified statement that you maintain some nebulous idea of "custody" seems oblivious to even simple risk.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/data-connection/initia...
This isn't even getting into their "forward deployed software engineers" or how that whole aspect of their "product" works.
You can run it on-prem, where you can actually technologically enforce data custody.
Custody enforcement using the cloud hosted product, is mostly contractual, although they do offer some technical features, like encrypting all data using a AWS KMS key in the customer's AWS account.
Still, this relies on trusting that they won't make their own separate copies of the data.
> Custody of the data remains with the customer
pinky promise?
Well, they are to some degree.
Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so' (theregister.com)
76 points by fauigerzigerk 6 months ago | 7 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153
In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.
That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all
Most Epic products aggressively isolate data. The majority of instances are run on-premises, and even those hosted on cloud platforms are single-tenant. They have a good record for data security and privacy; afaik all Epic data breaches were actually caused by infiltration of other customer systems.
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No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate. I can get being politically opposed to the conservative politics of some of its founders, but the vast majority of conservative-founded companies don't get nearly as much criticism. A lot of it is seriously borderline Q-anon levels of conspiratorial talk. Just look at the comment in this thread insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to assassinate people with orbital weapons.
The people controlling Palantir are openly anti-democratic. They see technology as a means of controlling and ruling the common folk. They said so, repeatedly, in public, of their own volition.
Can you point to where they have said so? The only one that comes to mind is Thiel's quote from 2009 about democracy being incompatible worth freedom (the populace will vote to remove freedoms, e.g. try to ban AI or other technological advances and whatnot). But pointing out flaws in democracy is a far cry from actual wanting to get rid of democracy.
If he's stated an actual intent to end democracy in the US, it'd be good to cite that.
https://sfl.media/peter-thiel-isnt-anti-democracy-hes-post-d...
His vision of statehood is autocratic in that he emphasises efficiency and progress which can only be achieved via a CEO-like government. Please watch the interview with Joe Rogan.
The only quote from Thiel in that piece is the same "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" I wrote about in my comment.
Alex Karp is a deeply unlikable human who talks about how his software is used to kill people, and that he wants to drop a lot of fentanyl-laced urine across all the negative reporters.
Also he has stated that critics should be sprayed with fentanyl laced urine.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/02/17/palantir-piss/
Why should we feel good about him running any company.
Do you think there are zero people on earth who need to be killed?
Certainly we do not need to make those decisions based on fuzzy vector search, probably how the opening salvo of the Iran war ended up killing a hundred school girls
Hating Palantir without having any idea of what they are is the trendy thing to do. Their leaders are toxic which doesn’t help the case, but the core issue really is just that in this political climate, people all over the western world don’t trust their governments, and it’s also trendy to distrust anyone making money, as well as tech companies - especially those involved in data and AI related businesses - so the fact that Palantir makes these distrusted actors more competent while making money doing it, is seen as siding with the devil.
So it’s a trust problem, if the government were seen as effective and worthy then I want them to be effective, which includes using the data they collect effectively. In this climate trendy people would prefer that their corrupt government is also fully incompetent to limit the effect of the corruption.
Their founder is a lunatic giving a lecture tour about the anti-Christ and the need to move beyond national-states. The CEO is on some bizarre PR tour where he comes off like a Bond villain.
It’s obvious all your questions are not authentic and you have a motive and this thread is clearly being astroturfed but I will entertain.
They build immigrant databases and help ICE (a corrupt agency performing illegal, unethical and unamerican agenda) find people to deport.
Hopefully people here can see past this aloof act you’ve got going on.
Responses like these are a big part of what convinces me that the hysteria around Palantir is unfounded. I see broad claims about how the company is violating privacy, going to overthrow democracy, etc. but when pushed for details, most people just fall back on basic partisanship.
Sure bud keep playing dumb
Hope the compensation is worth being a bottom feeder
This reminds of back when DOGE was doing its rounds and all of sudden there were waves of posts with the same tone making the same argument.
Your point is well taken, though it's worth pointing out that literally yesterday Palantir was co-awarded a contract for building orbital weapons systems [0].
The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:
- access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos
- its chairman's specific pro-authoritarian mission (so pointedly so that the Catholic Church felt the need to make a specific rebuke a few days ago [1])
- a regulatory environment in which its monetary risks are arguably minimized if it takes the broadest possible reading of e.g. HIPAA's law enforcement exceptions that mention "written administrative requests" [2]
- documented concerns about governance [3]
Those concerned with this confluence are far from conspiracy theorists, and may be quite rationally interested in protecting e.g. the public reputation of their hospital networks, and ability to service - to say nothing of their desire to protect the privacy of their patients.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-03-24/and...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-... - https://archive.is/2EOXa
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-doe...
[3] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/letter-to-palantir-techn...
Have you considered that a weapons platform like that could be necessary? Or are you just opposed to Palantir being part of it.
This comment is written in an interesting way. If it's unnecessary, the OP's comment is fine. If the platform is "necessary" in some abstract sense, you've avoided articulating that argument by putting the burden back on OP to justify their position.
That seems like an interesting discussion though. Why would it be necessary?
There's ample evidence that medium range ballistic missile technology is proliferating, fired from land based systems. It is difficult to intercept these with ground-based launchers. But, if incepting from orbit the probability you score a hit is higher. The catch is that it is a) extremely complex, and b) very expensive to develop and implement a system like this. Enter Palantir and Anduril.
The weight of this argument rests on how much you care about being in range of MRBMs, how likely you think it is that MRBMs will be a decisive factor in a future conflict, and whether or not you want the United States to be victorious in this potential conflict. Many people do not care about this threat, don't think MRBMs will matter, and/or want the United States to lose. I am not one of those people.
I think that three things can simultaneously be true:
(1) missile defense systems based on deep data fusion with cutting-edge espionage systems for launch detection are becoming increasingly useful and necessary
(2) we should be thoughtful that these types of espionage fusion systems could also be used for domestic surveillance, and advocate for close scrutiny and oversight of these systems
(3) a healthcare administrator can make a rational argument that their patient information should not be handled by the same company building those espionage-advised data fusion systems... lest the close relationship with government quietly transform into unauthorized data sharing with other government actors, without clear paths towards legal recourse if this were to occur, and with potentially irrevocable consequences for patients
well, there _is_ this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
"bars states party to the treaty from placing weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit, installing them on the Moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise stationing them in outer space"
but 1. today's sentiment is: to hell with these treaties-schmeaties, and 2. what you mentioned is not yet a weapon of _mass_ destruction, so we're all good!
Claiming a particular weapons system is “necessary” is war brained. There are other ways of survival besides bombing the shit out of each other.
True, I am partial to battle drill 1A.
> The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:
> - access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos
Do you have evidence that Palantir itself - not customers using Palantir software - has access to this data?
I think you are maybe reading into the initial claim too much and not hearing the follow ups. There are two things here: 1. the overall character, broad charter, and people that compose the company, and 2. the theory that it is a specific agent in illegal or harmful data trafficking. And sure, I think we can take 2 away completely here if we simply must assume good faith from these guys and the contracts that they make, but that still kinda leaves 1 which is pretty big. Like 1 answers your follow up question of why everyone hates them either way, but you still are countering it by trying to ask what it has to do with 2. If that makes sense?
And really, I don't think anyone wants to "oh sweet summer child" you in your doubts here, but it's really extremely hard to not want to just... gesture around the world right now and ask why you still believe in some kind of sanctity or infallibility of something like the legal contract or other various forms of de jure "accountability" when it comes to tech companies, especially one as big as this.
This pattern in which people make claims about Palantir having access to private information, then retreat back to something along the lines of "I don't like the character of the company" is exactly the kind of thing that leads me to believe people don't actually have tangible complaints with the company.
This is true, but Palantir also describes what they do in a way that is going to cause skepticism and confusion. When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.
> When they talk about the ontology acting as a "digital twin" of the customer environment one could be forgiven for thinking this does actually mean Palantir is exfiltrating customer data and cloning it, which is not what happens.
This is basically saying you have the same DB schema on your dev environment as you do on prod. If anyone made that kind leap in logic, I would conclude they have little to no technical know how.
Oh, I agree with you. Perhaps I should've said "one could forgive a journalist ...", who tend to not be familiar with these things.
Saying they have ‘conservative values’ is the death blow to conservativism, given their explicit anti-democratic, and fundamentally extremist leadership
Look into Peter Thiel, the current administration and how it all ties back to Palantir. No conspirations here, just openly known facts.
What are those openly known facts?
>No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate.
Mostly because hating Palantir is a trendy leftist virtue signal. Defund ICE being another one. Defund the police was trendy five years ago, but is no longer popular.
Why are so many entities dealing with Palantir? They are a poison pill for customers.
Palantir is a glorified IT consulting company. You tell them "I want a system to manage patient records" and they will dispatch a team of engineers fresh out of college to build it for you while charging top dollar. They are able to get government & military contracts because of lobbying and influence, but generally everything you see about them online is marketing.
Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting company...
Cambridge Analytica was much more successful as a marketing company, vastly overstating their influence and impact
They don't need marketing. It's very well known what they do and for whom they work.
I always tell people this - that Palantir is just IBM. Instant hate feedbacks from both left and right.
Left: They kill babies and have your poop data.
Right: They are so much more than that. That have super intelligence AI with drone puppetry. Have you seen the leaked dashboards!
Is IBM really the company we want to hold up as a moral standard?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
They deliver on contracts or else they wouldn’t keep getting them
They don't have in-house talent to implement what they want. The same reasons they used to hire Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC. Palantir is one rung up from those places when it comes to talent/ability to deliver.
+1. Think of it like a consulting shop that can deliver customized software instead of just slide decks and excel workbooks.
Which customers? Outside of the HN bubble, very few consumers know or care which entities are using Palantir.
With the controversial contracts they already have with the US, I think they had enough and should keep it that way...
Just saying.
Palantir is an AI firm now? Thought it was a data collection/spyware firm.
If they're not a spyware company then they really super duper picked the wrong name. Maybe they were just going for evil, in which case ... well I'm glad NYC hospitals have dropped them and I hope many, many more companies and organizations choose the same path.
The point is why are they suddenly an "AI" firm, not to debate the fine meanings of spyware.
Are the other spyware companies that you mention in your post also rebranding as "AI" firms?
I like to think of Palantir as JIRA or salesforce for killing people.
All AI companies are spyware companies.
> Palantir is an AI firm now?
Of course. Everyone is an AI firm now.
Sending the vampire away after he drank his fill is better than nothing, even if it's too little too late.
Dear UK government, keep Palantir the hell away from my data.
when private company is deeply embedded in public health systems it is just dangerous
I’m confused. Who do you think makes all the medical equipment like CT scans, MRIs, etc. because it’s sure not the government
Private companies are embedded in every healthcare system in the world, even public ones.
I'm talking about the extent of a single company's influence
NYC schools just passed some AI guidelines as well. No training on student PII data, no final grades, etc. Unfortunately that's a pinprick for the behemoth.
Palantir is the most evil company nowadays.
Palantir can install a data backdoor at anytime with their software. If you haven't noticed that businesses are openly violating data privacy you aren't paying attention. I don't have trust in our judicial system if Trump pardons criminals everyday.
J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel's Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.
A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.
I'd be concerned if any of the parties involved were halfway competent. This is a grift for taxpayer dollars, nothing more.
Oh cool. All is well.
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I think he is implying that their enterprise contracts are all on prem and airgapped? Seems unlikely to me they do that for all their customers but they likely do for the government ones anyway.
It's not necessarily airgapped but yes. Air gapping is a bit much for hospital data, which after all does have to be readily accessible to the people working at the hospital or group of hospitals.
> Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics
They work with law enforcement agencies and help them process data they legally collect into other government databases. Their main product is merging data from various databases and adding a UI layer for analysis.
Basically, Palantir is a data integration company that works for government and larges businesses under contract. Some data they get hired to work on includes surveillance data and military intelligence collection.
Main product is good PR.
Main product is sales tactics.
> ah? Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics (from the above article contract). The base necessity for doing this work is... data, and the data is somewhere, stored.
It's on prem at the customer.
I know nothing about palantir in particular but typically these software stacks have a bunch of random crap in them to deal with fetching data from other system's the customer has.
There's a bizarre conspiracy going around that Palantir is some all-seeing force in the world trying to turn everyone into mindless drones. In reality, it's just a company that—like it or not—has been relatively successful at securing massive contracts with the government and major corporations.
In a healthcare context, internal pricing and patient data are heavily protected by law. If Palantir were as guilty of surveilling your medical data as you allege, that would be tremendously illegal, and companies much larger and more influential would have strong legal grounds to sue it into oblivion. If you think Palantir has a tight grip on the government, consider the influence of the health systems it works with—some of which are the largest employers in their states. The idea that an all-powerful company can control the government doesn’t make sense if smaller companies, which donate less, are somehow exerting unchecked control over larger ones.
Of course, most of these concerns stem from two things: (1) its approach to autonomous warfare and (2) concerns about immigration surveillance. Autonomous warfare is coming, whether you like it or not. Palantir’s role in that is not related to its work in the commercial sector—unless you're suggesting they’re holding back potential revenue by not selling highly advanced robotics to corporate clients. Concerns about immigration surveillance are also somewhat overstated because, again, Palantir legally cannot use data from its commercial work (unless one of its clients severely mismanaged their contract). In that case, it’s really the U.S. government you should be criticizing — not the contractor simply trying to make money.
The law is generally a bad proxy for whether or not society approves of xyz commercial behavior
I don't think people are accusing Palantir of criminally misusing the data. The government rewrites the laws around what these analytics firms are capable of, and as such Palantir operates in that space. Whether or not it's "illegal" doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is creepy Big Brother shit.
Also bullshit that they don't store data.
>Like it or not, there really isn't any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work Palantir
That’s only making European entrepreneurs salivate at all of that sweet EU funding they can suck up to replicate PLTR in service of their sovereignty initiatives.
Europe is currently lagging on the cloud front, the AI front and even the SaaS front. They can't even wean themselves off of MS Office ffs, after all the shenanigans Microsoft and the US have pulled against them. I have no hopes of the EU building anything that can replicate even 25% of Palantir.
They only have to replicate Palantir marketing and garnish it with a bit of nationalism. Not like the government is good at getting its money's worth in the end.
Trust me, they can't even do that.
And not forget hardware. All they have is meaningless leaders with zero vision. My dumb AI claw tool has better view of the world than they do. They might as well be replaced by those AI agents. Probably better outcome that current
"controversial"
Everyone knows what's going on, but also everyone is too afraid to stand up for some reason.
What is going on?
Their main product is just consulting and PowerBI but for government. So much hysteria online!
Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy
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Thiel is pro-dictatorship as near as one can tell. Karp probably isn’t sane enough to evaluate
Hysteria? Have you listened to Karp? Palantir pushes some pretty shit-tier BI noise to clueless executives (it's actually uproarious the mythology that has built around that company), and this weird creep talks like they're the masters of the universe.
Thiel is another incredibly bizarre creep, and he sits as the chairman of the board. Both are very tightly associated with the Trump crime syndicate and the US government, which increasingly is the world's #1 threat, and should be treated as equally dangerous.
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The US is undisputedly the world's #1 threat. Like who do you think is even in the running?
Massive military that has bombed ten or so countries in the past year, overthrown a couple more, threatened close allies such that they're getting blood supplies ready and bombs to remove runways. Enormous nuclear arsenal, all in the hands of self-dealing criminal halfwit pathological liar with malignant narcissism as the country flushes down the toilet. A "Department of War" leader who is a simpleton alcoholic clown who rails off "give me tough guy speeches" that he got from ChatGPT, gloating about blatantly illegal -- both in international and US laws -- war crimes, including murdering people in boats just by rebranding them "narco terrorists". A governing party that increasingly is stocked with INSANE fundy nuts who declare that global warming isn't real because the bible didn't mention it, and who salivate about unleashing armageddon. The country is basically lawless at this point -- a busted plutocracy -- and the securities industry has become farcical it is filled with such grift and absolute lawless fraud.
No one holds a candle to that dangerous nuthouse. North Korea, China, Russia...no one is an iota of a danger that the rogue, war-criming United States of America is.
And the "best" part is that we're entering the era of the worst nuclear proliferation in history because of the utter insanity we've seen in the US. I suspect many "own the libs" Americans aren't going to like what inevitably comes next.
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Uh...what? Do you know what an ad hominem is? Bizarre.
I directly described the United States of America as it is today. This is just fact, and to the entire rest of the world, America is a busted idiocracy that represents by far the greatest threat to world peace.
EDIT: Oh forgot to mention that the US is directly and openly involved in political interference in many of its allies. Alberta in Canada is a target of a massive US operation right now. Just about every European country. Which is pretty ironic given that the US is basically a fractured pseudo-country where one half of the country hates the other half, and that by all rights should be split up.
Boy, with friends like these, we'll all hope that China's nukes hit their marks with good accuracy.
Yeah ad hominem means to the person in latin.
The people literally are the position. They wield absolute, unchecked power over the might of the US government. What a bizarre thing to complain about.
Trump could literally end humanity tonight. You understand that, right? This proud-he-passed-a-dementia-test serial liar, felonious rapist was given absolutely, unquestioned control over the world's largest nuclear arsenal by the US public. Utter insanity.
Trump and FoxNews Hegseth could send the enormous US military -- screw good healthcare or education, you've got invisible planes! -- to invade Greenland or Canada or Spain. Tonight. With zero opposition.
There are zero checks or restraints on this criminal empire, and the world is seeing the results. It started internally, and that was a spectacular disaster (lol $2T deficit and spiralling economy) so now it's on to the next distraction after the other. Iran didn't give the boost he hoped for, so wonder what the next target will be. Panama? Cuba? Oh I hear they have the "Shield of the Americas" now and think they have Manifest Destiny over the entire Western Hemisphere.
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How perfectly on brand.
This thread is being astroturfed and trolled. Don’t take it to heart