4 ms·
I don't think it's correct to say that they sell surveillance services. When I think of "surveillance" I think it means data collection. Palantir doesn't build
by manfredo 6y ago
I don't think it's correct to say that they sell surveillance services. When I think of "surveillance" I think it means data collection. Palantir doesn't build data collection tools, they build data visualization tools. The government already has the data, Palantir builds a tool to better browse that data. The tool Palantir replaces if often Microsoft Excel. Does it follow that Excel is a digital surveillance tool?
- NationalPark 6y agoYou've made this distinction a couple times in these comments and I just don't buy it. If Palantir doesn't provide any value, why does the government keep hiring them to build "visualizations" of domestic surveillance tools? I think we can both oppose this kind of policy politically, and rightfully call out the companies and the individual engineers who do this kind of anti-privacy work.
- manfredo 6y agoThe ability to better visualize this info, is the value. Governments are willing to pay for Palantir because doing things tracking down pill mills is easier if you can perform operations like filtering for people that bought the same drug twice in a day, and then plotting those purchases on map. It's a lot harder to do this kind of analysis with Excel.
- smt88 6y agoSo what if Palantir is selling facial recognition software? That's technically the same: post-processing (video) data that the government has already collected. Or what if they are doing predictive crime? Or tracking suspected criminals across marketing data sets? Surveillance is dangerous at its core because it gives the govt power to target one or more people. If Palantir is doing that (and it is), then it has the same potential for harm as any other surveillance product.