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. A

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.