I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.
The incentives are aligned that way so it would require surveillance and conspiracy to prevent it from happening.
Furthermore, collecting large amounts of information on your own population creates a lowest effort point of entry for an adversary to gather that info, and it's more useful to them.
What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? I wonder if you’re falling for a lot of the marketing hype…
Publicly traded companies are required to report certain financial facts about the company, but they’re still extremely opaque.
In this case espionage and surveillance, traditionally domains of the state.
>What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do?
They're not subject to privacy legislation and limitations that the police is. There's a concrete exapmle of this, commercial storage of license plate data in the US is largely unregulated, so police units that have legal limitations on how long they can hold citizen data simply go to the private market and buy that data from those firms. That kind of circumvention of the law and outsourcing of responsibility is probably a large part of the Palantir business model.
Seems kind of insane to take your tax payer money and use it to buy surveillance data on you, a good chunk of which probably isn't even legal to otherwise collect and completely undermine the rule of law and democratic control of policing.
And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard, just like you or I aren’t held to that standard.
That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mostly for police or defense work. That's not how you, I or most Fortune 500 companies do business.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
And it absolutely is how you, I, and every other employed organization works. You seem to not understand what a contractor is.