[spartango]

Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but the author doesn't make it clear what exactly is objectionable about Palantir with respect to privacy issues. That's not to say that there isn't anything, but just that it would be helpful to have a synopsis of what exactly they're doing wrong.

I understand that they do work with governments, but that's as much as I've seen in the press. There has been far wider discussion of the privacy challenges facing Facebook and Google.

[bcg1]

Among other things, Palantir enjoys exorbitant privilege due to its ties with the US government and its "intelligence" tentacles. It is stands to reason that there is little or no firewall between the taxpayer funded technology/data assets that Palantir has amassed and what they are marketing to private industry. As a state sponsored entity, the burden should be placed on them to ensure transparency, and they should not be given the benefit of the doubt if they fail to assuage such implications.

Additionally, it might be good to understand the mentality of an activist or even just a person that is passionate about something. For instance, if you are anti-war, there is no such thing as an ethical defense contractor. If you are an anarchist, there is no such thing as a just government. If you are an activist against "surveillance capitalism" it stands to reason that there is no "good" enterprise that comes out of In-Q-Tel.

[nraynaud]

They collect health and financial data on people to help health insurance companies deny claim to people who want their medical expense reimbursed. And they are suspected to be in the chain of data (probably phone data collection and mining) to drone people in Yemen and Afghanistan.

[rabidonrails]

Source?

[tobltobs]

Come on, those "Source please" requests for stuff you could google yourself in about 3 seconds are really lame.

[spiffage]

In this case, it's appropriate. Palantir doesn't "collect health and financial data on people", and I've never seen anything in the press that suggests they do.

[nraynaud]

Well, how do you do health care insurance fraud detection without data when your expertise is big data? they might technically just create and manage collection and storage tools for others, but the end goal is that grandpa can't get his cancer treatment reimbursed thanks to data that has been collected on him with the help of Palantir.

[dsp1234]

I don't have any information about the other parts of the issue, but they do work in the healthcare industry.

https://www.palantir.com/solutions/healthcare-delivery/

[spiffage]

Sure. Palantir, like other successful enterprise software companies, has a variety of large, enterprisey customers. But saying that Palantir collects health and financial data on people sounds super scary, when in fact Palantir isn't in the data collection business in the first place.

[dtornabene]

It's not really though. The "citation please" is usually the first punch in a one-two of cite/attack-source. Palantir analyzes, yes, not collect. But what is done with that data is not exactly innocent either.

[unfamiliar]

"Citation please" is a gentle reminder - that pops up whenever someone spouts some unfounded or unverifiable opinion - for people doing so in future to please save us all time and give a source upfront. And from what I've seen, it is usually only applied to comments that can't be backed up.

[dtornabene]

You're getting downvoted but this is a critique thats getting more and more valid, especially around topics that are more likely to provoke emotional responses, like politics, surveillance, etc.

[sageabilly]

Palantir started as a data intelligence firm focusing on predictive analysis, shopping its wares to the government. They have gotten really, really, really amazing at predictive data and are now moving into the private sector, selling predictive analysis tools to healthcare, insurance, security, etc for all kinds of applications.

Palantir has technologies that see everything, scrape everything, and store everything. They are not public with all of their products or capabilities, and their choice of bedfellows doesn't inspire confidence that they are altruistic with regards to who they do business with. From what I've heard by way of one-off comments and drunken bragging from people who work/have worked their, their capabilities are far beyond even the remotest of media speculation.

Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years, Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients’ headquarters to customize its programs. Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.

Palantir’s advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, who says in an interview that “I wish we had a tool of its power” before 9/11. General David Petraeus, the most recent former CIA chief, describes Palantir to FORBES as “a better mousetrap when a better mousetrap was needed” and calls Karp “sheer brilliant.”

Among those using Palantir to connect the dots are the Marines, who have deployed its tools in Afghanistan for forensic analysis of roadside bombs and predicting insurgent attacks. The software helped locate Mexican drug cartel members who murdered an American customs agent and tracked down hackers who installed spyware on the computer of the Dalai Lama. In the book The Finish, detailing the killing of Osama bin Laden, author Mark Bowden writes that Palantir’s software “actually deserves the popular designation Killer App.” [1] ___________________________

Clients include the Los Angeles Police Department which used Palantir to parse and connect 160 data sets: Everyone from detectives to transit cops to homeland security officials uses Palantir at the LAPD. According to the document, Palantir provides a timeline of events and has helped the massive police department sort its records.

As of 2013, Palantir was used by at least 12 groups within the US Government including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED-defeat organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services were planning on pilot testing the use of Palantir in 2013 to investigate tips received through a hotline. A second test was run by the same organization to identify potentially fraudulent medical providers in the Southern region of the US.

The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir. In fact, cyber analysts working for the now-defunct Information Warfare Monitor used the system to mine data on the China-based cyber groups GhostNet and The Shadow Network.[2]

[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-o... [2]http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals...

[s_q_b]

From my vantage point, Palantir appears to be an amusing house of cards.

The gossip on this coast, where most of their government and corporate overlords live, is much less rosy.

Basically, any civilian agency that gets told it needs a "data science" or "predictive analytics" capability from the executive Cyber initiatives just buys what the law enforcement and intelligence guys bought. Silicon Valley is also widely believed to be superior to the local scene.

These factors drive a cycle of government purchase leading to sweetheart maintenance deals leading to product validation leading to more government purchases.

Their "forward deployed engineers" are what the rest of us call "software development consultants." Their tool stack is a series of pretty visualizations over a typical data lake setup.

It is designed to be accessed by techs (analysts) and not devs. The essential algos were forked from Paypal's fraud detection code. Their products (Gotham, Metropolis, etc.) are all derivatives of that initial decade-old effort.

Palantir is still just a $250 mil revenue, zero profit startup. It runs on private investment cash that it will never be able to afford to repay, absent continued infusions of revenue from a confused government patron.

Their CEO announced in 2013 they won't IPO because disclosure rules for public company reporting requirements would make "running a company like [Palantir] very difficult".

My sense is that they'll never IPO because it would collapse the company.

[api]

If they truly have insider government backing, they may never collapse for the same reason as GM, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc. If your backer is a state with access to a printing press, failure is synonymous with either failure of said state or loss of political favor. Such entities are de-facto government agencies and are not subject to the normal rules of economics.

From the government's POV the advantage of creating and sustaining these kinds of private sector de-facto government agencies is that by being nominally private they escape reams of government red tape as well as FOIA and congressional oversight requirements. You get all the (ironically) privacy benefits of being private but are still more or less a government agency. It's basically a cut-out. The CIA is fairly well known to do this a lot since it also lets them conduct domestic operations that are technically forbidden to them. It's also done for a lot of black project government R&D to exempt said projects from disclosure requirements that would bust their secrecy.

As with all government activities, whether this practice is "evil" or not depends quite a bit on the details of what is being done and why. Federal red tape is so onerous that to some extent you have to escape it to get certain kinds of work done at all.

I don't know just how in bed Palantir is, but they certainly seem to be such an entity from an outsider's perspective.

[duncan_bayne]

If your backer is a state with access to a printing press, failure is synonymous with either failure of said state or loss of political favor. Such entities are de-facto government agencies and are not subject to the normal rules of economics.

Very true. It makes me sad when people continue to refer to the USA as a capitalist country, especially in the context of a criticism of capitalism.

[nickik]

Any Tolkin fan can tell you what the problem is, if you look to deep into them, you will be watched by the all knowing eye of NS..ähh.auron.