[vrganj]

Two Reasons:

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?

[qweiopqweiop]

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.

[sizero]

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.”

[autoexec]

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.

[iinnPP]

Part of the core offering is data washing.

[rjmunro]

What does that mean?

What are they actually doing for the MoD? Are they reading MoD data out and processing it elsewhere?

[crimsoneer]

they most definitely do not, and especially not on-prem, national security systems like are being discussed here. They sell software.

https://www.palantir.com/palantir-is-still-not-a-data-compan...

[mborch]

Deployments can be on-prem or cloud-based depending on needs and constraints.

[gib444]

Stop sealioning

[qweiopqweiop]

What? I want to know more to make an informed decision. Do you think you're adding more to the discussion than me here?

[gib444]

Absolutely. Calling out "just asking questions" to prevent derailing is helpful. Look at you asking questions again :)

[qweiopqweiop]

I don't consider it derailing and I'm not going to apologise for asking questions :)

[Manuel_D]

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.