It's one thing for consumer internet companies to show me an ad for mattresses because they know I searched for mattresses. It's wholly another to help government entities aggregate license plate data, run "predictive policing" programs, run the Pentagon's spy drone program, and help ICE track immigrants, as Palantir does. Frankly if given the choice I'll take the mattress ads.
this isn't true actually. the police uses services like Palantir as a sort of get around because lots of data collection literally requires a warrant[1]
The US suffers from a schizophrenic legal situation where it has (for good reasons) barred its government from spying on its citizens, but has somehow outsourced it to private entities, the one level of indirection apparently makes that okay.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/cbp-does-end-run...
This is a pattern I've seen from America in general, loopholes against the spirit of the law, healthcare through 3rd parties, it seems there is always somewhere to kick the buck down for liability purposes. There is always a quest to find a technicality for a way out of some rules, the spirit of the rules don't seem to matter much.
It's clear that the authors of the US Constitution believed that it should be difficult for the government to perform certain enforcement actions. The last 200+ years of jurisprudence and legislation back this up. The police need a warrant in order to search a home. The prosecution needs a court order to compel testimony.
I don't have a problem with saying "the LAPD is going to enforce traffic laws whether or not Palantir assists them". But my response would be "yes, and we should think very carefully about how easy we make it for 'enforce traffic law' to look like 'mass surveillance'". Legislation and jurisprudence move a lot slower than we'd like and I think it's good that individuals and companies think about how they choose to participate in these systems and if they're over-enabling government enforcement and surveillance while we wait for politicians and judges to play catch-up.
they'll collect or mine whatever they can get their hands, i'm certain of that. it's a data company.
Palantir produces data analysis tools, this is basically Excel but for bigger data sets. Microsoft doesn't get what you put into your Excel sheets (not really sure now...) and neither does Palantir with their platform.
They probably have some sort of telemetry to monitor how their tools are used, to "improve user experience", like most large software vendors. But it is not related to the data being processed.
Are you familiar with Project Maven? They gather drone data and have humans label it so they can plan drone strikes and other intelligence efforts.
The only real solution I've found is to help build the fully agent-centric web, where there are no third parties - full P2P Protocol Cooperativism. [1] [2]
[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
Palantir the company doesn't have access to the data. The government agencies have access to the data. Palantir licenses its software to these organizations. The company doesn't have special access to any sensitive data.
Well that's a good reason.
The point I'm making is that I don't agree on Palantir's approach and strategy. If you watch the Ava Duvernay's documentary '13th' you'll see that systemic oppression of black bodies never ended. The school-to-prison pipeline guarantees exploitation and incarceration of the US's dark history of slavery and genocide.
So instead of Palantir pushing for systemic change, I see their technology as regressive and focused on giving power to unjust causes.
If you want to read more about how algorithms recreate bias, there's quite a lot of material that has come out recently. Here is an important point from Algorithsm of Oppression:
※ Those who have the power to design systems--classification or technical [like library, museum, & information professionals]--hold the ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege certain types of information over others.[1]
There's also another book called Automating Inequality, among others.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2206336831?book_show_a...
There seems to me to be a strong neoliberal/libertarian population on Hacker News who believes, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, that 'there is no alternative'. They have completely soaked up Silicon Valley's Imperialist 'Manifest Destiny' mission.
They can't see their own privileged position and power. They attribute their own success to their personal efforts, instead of seeing how various social institutions (including knowledge and access to a rich scientific inheritance) built them up.
So when we pose them a question about Project Maven, they want to identify the one 'bad apple' [1] instead of facing the fact that systemically something is rotten, and that we might have to evolve the underlying architectures. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNZXV7jOG0&feature=youtu.be
[2] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
They are both bad and Palantir's wrongs are, if anything, far more apparent https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-en...
I'd say they're still a Silicon Valley company at heart.
Oh well ok then, they don't do any data collection or mining, they just sell the tools to empower three-letter agencies to do it more effectively. Conscience is clear then!
I imagine that before Palantir came around, the analysts at these agencies did what most other analysts anywhere do and used Excel to create sophisticated pivot tables when working on {insert defense operation}.
Where does it stop being okay? To the extent that it even matters, Palantir appears to at least own up to the fact that they are used by governments.
> socially useful purpose
Who decides what's "socially useful"?
Even per their S-1, their market sizing shows "Commercial" to be a substantial proportion of their aspirations:
> Commercial. Our estimate of the TAM in the commercial sector is $56 billion.
> Government. We estimate the TAM in the government sector, including government agencies in the United States, its allies, and in other countries abroad whose values align with liberal democracies, is $63 billion.
> The company’s top three customers — which aren’t disclosed — together represented 28% of the company’s revenue for 2019. Its top twenty customers represented 67% of total revenues, with each one of those customers averaging $24.8 million in revenue.
They admit they count every single government sub-agency as a different customer (their example is NIH and the CDC would count separately despite the same parent organization) so the top 25 is basically just governments. There is incredible revenue concentration there.
Metropolis got deprecated (read renamed) Foundry because they kept screwing up their sales and decided a rebrand would be more effective on their commercial side.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-differences-between-...
per someone who runs tech on the commercial side,
Foundry started as our attempt to create scalable process and rigor around data integration. There's a longer story to tell here, but the short version is that we started out with off-the-shelf orchestration systems for running jobs on a schedule (think Jenkins and Rundeck — things that were more robust than cron). At some level, that worked, and we had to figure out how to scale it, leading to a combination of HDFS, Rundeck/Jenkins, a git repo, and a common language for mutating data.
Also, it’s important to consider their TAM projections because 1) those are the only numbers we have in this S-1 that specifically delineates government vs non-government, and 2) their aspirational valuation is predicated on this TAM. It’s who they think they will grow up to become.
Their largest project is Palantir Gotham which is exclusively for government agencies (federal, state, ICE, and by Project Maven after the tech companies abandoned it due to ethics concerns!)
You’re talking primarily about Palantir Metropolis which is used by hedge funds. Not exactly some beneficial use of technology to counterweight working with ICE to separate children from their families.
They don’t list their top customers because they are top secret government agencies but if you look at their customers then it’s clear that the ones paying them the most are secretive government agencies and it’s been that way since day 1
Did you even read their S-1? Palantir Gotham is NOT “exclusively for government agencies”. According to their own filing, it’s used by their Commercial team too. It even says so on their website.
> You’re talking primarily about Palantir Metropolis which is used by hedge funds. Not exactly some beneficial use of technology to counterweight working with ICE to separate children from their families.
If you’re going to attack them, do it honestly by accurately representing them. Palantir isn’t used just “used by hedge funds”, if you actually read their prospectus and their website, their use cases include: auto racing, automotive parts manufacturing improvement, corporate cyber security, regulatory compliance (incl GDPR), pharma/drug development, and airline route optimization.
https://www.palantir.com/solutions/
> but if you look at their customers then it’s clear that the ones paying them the most are secretive government agencies ande it’s been that way since day 1
Yeah this is conjecture, at best. Nobody disputes that Palantir works with the government, but you don’t have enough information to claim with certainty that they work only with the government, and how much of their revenue comes from the 3-letter agencies. Unless you can actually substantiate your claims, these are just unfalsifiable hunches.
1. "We generated $742.6 million in revenue in 2019"
2. "The total remaining deal value of the contracts that we had been awarded by government agencies in the United States and allied countries around the world, including existing contractual obligations and contractual options available to those government agencies, was $1.2 billion"
3. "We do not include government contracts totaling $2.6 billion, as of June 30, 2020, that we have been awarded where the funding of such contracts — also known as indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (“IDIQ”) contracts — has not yet been determined."
So they have 1.62 years of committed revenue from governments and 5.12 years of revenue including the IDIQ contracts. Even assuming the contracts are spread over five years, which seems to be their long term contract length, it indicates their revenue is overwhelmingly from the government.
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As for Palantir Gotham being for government agencies, here is the language from their S-1:
1. "We built Gotham, our first platform, for government operatives in the defense and intelligence sectors...Gotham is now used broadly across government functions."
2. "Gotham enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, and helps U.S. and allied military personnel find what they are looking for. We later found that the challenges faced by commercial institutions when it came to working with data were fundamentally similar. Companies routinely struggle to manage let alone make sense of the data involved in large projects. Foundry was built for them."
See how it says Foundry was built for commercial and Gotham for "government agencies"?
Let me just pull the relevant quote from the S-1 directly for you:
> In 2019, 53% of our revenue came from commercial customers and 47% came from government agencies.
It's on page 88, in case you didn't make it that far.
But since you asked, here is an old article about it: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/09/15/cia-back...
Title: CIA-backed Palantir adds $50M to its war chest
“Palantir's backers include the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture fund and Thiel's Founders Fund. Its customers include government intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency.”
Google In-Q-Tel and Palantir and you’ll find 100 other articles about it.
For better or for worse, the American electorate approves of the CIA/FBI -> https://news.gallup.com/poll/224804/republicans-push-governm.... This is even more the case for defense, which is just about the only American institution that has had a reliably consistent approval rating -> https://truthout.org/articles/why-does-the-us-military-have-...
Alex Karp's CEO letter makes a similar point: "The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires."
No one and everyone decides what is socially useful. But it's fairly uncontroversial that invasion of privacy is not socially useful.
The majority of Americans appear to approve of the CIA/FBI -> https://news.gallup.com/poll/224804/republicans-push-governm...
“Socially useful” is well and good, right up until you disagree with the masses what constitutes “socially useful”. Silicon Valley engineers have input into that decision, but don’t get the final say.
Also, the NSA and CIA are act unconstitutionally and then hide the fact they are doing so from the voters. A fairer way to see if there is actually public support would be to allow a group of 100 people into the CIA/NSA archives and allow them full access to the entirety of the uncensored information, without anyone to justify what they have done beyond what has been recorded.
Otherwise, polling people on what unaccountable agencies do illegally in secret is (figuratively) like asking a North Korean if Kim Jong Un is doing a good job. They just don't have the information to judge.
This is literally the premise of clandestine agencies, and it’s not a new concept. They’ve been around for 50 years now. This isn’t some bait-and-switch, voters have always known what a clandestine agency is.
I understand that there exists some voters who don’t believe that clandestine agencies should exists. Unfortunately, such voters are in the minority. And unfortunately the majority of Americans find clandestine agencies (and in general, a strong defense) to be “socially useful”.
Again, I am directly refuting that argument. Voters can approve of clandestine agencies if they sign onto the fact that there exists some organs of the government that engage in secret activities unbeknownst to the public. What you are saying would only be correct if at first voters expected to be privy to the activities of the clandestine agencies, and then that happened to change. That has not been the case.
I have provided you an actual poll that asks users "do you approve of these secret agencies (that have always been secret)". When presented with evidence that voters do approve of that, it's a bit of a hack to say that it's literally impossible for voters to approve of it. Not every voter in America is a progressive programmer that subscribes to the EFF's world view.
So no, just being polled highly is not sufficient for something being democratically sanctioned. If you want to know if the People agree with what the CIA does let 100 people read the entire archives uncensored without any further justification and see what you get.
Indeed, that definition is definitely how I, and most tech-oriented folks I interact with, would define data mining. First and foremost.
But as stated in a different comment thread above, they don't "do" data mining, they just sell data mining tools and how-to manuals! Totally not the same thing!
Quite the gulp of koolaid to swallow straight faced
https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/20/palantir-denver-hq-ipo-dir...
Too bad the only government department concerned with that is the Department of Energy, and last I checked Palantir isn't a contract partner running any of the national labs.
They sure do fund cool basic science research though.
How useful would this software be without data from other companies?
"The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires.
Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.
From the start, we have repeatedly turned down opportunities to sell, collect, or mine data. Other technology companies, including some of the largest in the world, have built their entire businesses on doing just that.
Software projects with our nation’s defense and intelligence agencies, whose missions are to keep us safe, have become controversial, while companies built on advertising dollars are commonplace. For many consumer internet companies, our thoughts and inclinations, behaviors and browsing habits, are the product for sale. The slogans and marketing of many of the Valley’s largest technology firms attempt to obscure this simple fact."