> The only effective recourse is to make them collecting or storing the data illegal, but good luck with that, seeing as even when it is illegal they do it anyways (see: Snowden).

So, basically "screw rule of law, people are gonna do it anyway, so let's make money off it!"

And we would think the same about Lockheed, Raytheon or IBM. Just because there'll always be someone without morals doesn't mean we just shrug and say anything goes.

I’m not saying we should shrug and say anything goes. I’m saying all these companies share one commonality - the are building things for the US government.

If you want to see change that is more than just superficial, that’s where you need to make it.

Sure. That doesn't mean that what Palantir are doing isn't wrong - selling tools to an entity which is going to use them for harm is wrong, even if they might result in slightly less harm than selling them some other tool.

If someone comes into a gun shop and tells you they want to shoot up a classroom, selling them a pistol instead of a machine gun doesn't make you immune from judgement.

What makes Palantir different than any other software vendor that sells to the government?

Want to know how a lot of that data is generated? Microsoft excel. Arguably without excel there would be less data to act abusively with. If only Microsoft just refused to sell excel to the government.

People are happy to accept that excel is general enough that it isn’t made for that one purpose, but refuse to apply the same reasoning to Palantir; that may seem like whataboutism, but they genuinely are comparable tools if you take away the marketing and fear mongering.

As for your analogy, it’s more like you own shop that makes metalworking tools, and someone buys some. You don’t know what they are going to do with it, and (here’s where it gets opinionated) you shouldn’t need to care. You sold a tool to someone. Can the tool be used to make a gun? Sure. But it can also be used for anything else involving metal work. At some point we need to accept that the responsibility for how a tool of used needs to be placed on the person using it.

Palantir develops tools to be better at tasks that are pitched to them in some degree of detail through the RFP process and similar processes. Palantir as a company would not exist if it were not for the less savoury of those tasks.

We do not hear, "Government X purchases a couple thousand Excel licenses to keep a database on people it'd like to kill", and I imagine that Microsoft does not sell Excel to Government X in response to an RFP for tooling to keep track of people it'd like to kill.

(Of course, it'd probably stick its metaphorical fingers in its ears if it did hear about Excel being used for that purpose.)

Sometimes it's easier to make the change by going after people whose actions implement the policy, rather than those who establish it.

That's just it: I don't want to see that kind of change.

Edit: Changed "we don't" to "I don't". I don't want to claim to speak for anyone else but myself.

You don't want to see what kind of change?

I'm talking about neutering the surveillance state. That's not something that demonizing individual companies is ever going to do. You need to push for that change at the government level.

Unless you're pro-surveillance, but your previous comments made it seem like the opposite.

I misread, then. I assumed by "change" you meant what Palantir was doing.