Can someone explain why Palantir are seen as such a threat? My understanding is their product is a PowerBI++ and they don't host any user data themselves. Are people scared of backdoors?
1) It holds deeply sensitive data and does so in the US. In times of increased mistrust of the US, many (including myself) see that as a risky choice.
2) Speaking of mistrust in America and American corporations, have you heard their execs talk? It's absolute cuckoo-town:
> If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.
Well, you've convinced me. I'm scared of America, I'm scared of American companies and I'm scared of your company in particular.
Are you sure they hold sensitive data themselves though? My understanding was they integrate their tools with customers own data and don't have access to it themselves (at least in theory).
Of course I agree that quote is insane and you can dislike them for political reasons, but I want to understand the technological fears and see if any are unfounded.
The article mentions “while the underlying data may remain under the MoD’s control, any insights derived from that data do not. The implications of this, the insiders say, are far-reaching, especially because of the vast quantity of personal and other data the company has access to across UK government departments.”
It's really the insights you get from data that is of value.
It's no problem at all if some company has a list of GPS coordinates showing everywhere I've been until they start looking to see what those places are and start using that data to make assumptions about what I'm doing and where I'm likely to go in the future.
This isn't sealioning, this is a directly relevant point: The grandparent comment says that giving Palantir access to data is a risk.
But the parent comment points out that software companies often don't see all the data that their software is used to analyze. Microsoft does not see your tax return just because the IRS uses Excel.
My reading of [1] is that Palantir does data fusion. Their software, when installed on an organization's peripheral systems by their FDEs, centralizes all the org's data (within the org - not at palantir), and allows the org's management to do analyses on the pool.
I'm guessing that people are scared that the state will install one big palantir instance on all its systems. So that anything any part of the state learns about you, in any context or interaction, can be effortlessly used against you in every other context (perhaps via parallel construction in a lawsuit).
Basically, the fear would be that palantir makes mass surveillance data actionable, fuses surveillance programs, and incorporates most IT into mass surveillance programs.
The government would become less like a series of seperate agencies, more like a big consciousness that knows things (knows centrally, everything it was told anywhere).
Note this is just my interpretation of the fear.
Its fuzzy. Others may know more about palantir than me and thus have a more precise and grounded concern.
Even if the software is mundane I don't think most people should want their country offloading sensitive spy stuff to a guy who's obsessed with the antichrist to the extent the Vatican itself is complaining he's going to Rome and giving secret speeches about it.
I’ve only had their platforms explained to me by them (palantir) at a conference but the mental model that stuck with me was more of an operating system than a single tool. Think AWS managed services + databricks + whatever library of ready made intelligence software they have already built for others.
They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup.
The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value.
And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).
For a company that tries exclusively to sell to people that are very far removed from the use (government), yet have onerous reporting standards for all spending (government), there sure is very little independent reporting on the efficacy of whatever it is they are even selling. Even the contract with NHS was heavily censored. So frankly I oppose it on that ground alone.
Hence the Carney strategy up here in Canada. We can realize in hindsight that we were far too dependent on a single ally. We're diversifying - and even if America wants to become reliable again we've learned and will (hopefully) never be so dependent again.
In the post WW2 era most western countries grew lazy about sovereignty due to America's open-handed approach - this has been a wake up call and has severely lowered America's soft-power globally.
Who said we'd assume China will defend Canadian interests? The current strategy is focused on growing much closer to the EU while becoming a trade bridge for Atlantic/Pacific relations. Canada has a lot of clout on the international stage so we've been able to match-make trade linkages while expanding our market.
Canada isn't a first rate power - if the US or China decided to unilaterally target us it'd be deeply damaging. The hope is that working in concert with other middle powers we can form a cushion to soften a blow - not fully turn it.
Surely this time around, technological advancements in the name of "national security" won't end up used on its citizens ;)
Genuinely a bit shocked at the naivety on HN on this topic but maybe thats a misunderstanding on my part. Happy to be shown otherwise. Alex Karp, if you're reading this, please don't send your fent laced urine spraying drones after me!
The loudest people about this have no idea what they're talking about essentially.
It's not sufficient but the first thing you can filter by is anyone who comments on the name first (literally one of the most effective marketing strategies in government contracting history basically).
1) It holds deeply sensitive data and does so in the US. In times of increased mistrust of the US, many (including myself) see that as a risky choice.
2) Speaking of mistrust in America and American corporations, have you heard their execs talk? It's absolute cuckoo-town:
> If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.
Well, you've convinced me. I'm scared of America, I'm scared of American companies and I'm scared of your company in particular.
Good job, I guess?