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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Maybe that was a kneejerk on my part. There are times its useful, and in the cold decontextualized space of "online" it can be hard to read. I just want to note it's also used as a kind of attack, often on things that, as the poster I was attempting to support noted, could be discovered with literally the time it takes to open another browser tab.
you know that precise documentation of the exact role of Palantir in the drone attacks could lead you to jail? Palantir works in Yemen, works with all the agencies involved in drone attacks, has the perfect tools to find a phone to lock a hellfire on according to the quite lax US definition of "terrorist", and is always bragging about its role in the US wars abroad. So yes, every time I hear about Palantir, I suppose they were involved in the bombing of a wedding or of an EMT crew in a far away country, if they did not want to be associated with that, they can cut all their ties with the US wars on brown people, or publicly declare that they are just managing the meals and cleaning supplies.