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London Mayor Blocks Palantir
- CommanderData 5mo agoBrilliant, no longer a Londoner but I really think Khans done amazing compared to his predecessors. His alternatives look bleak and elitist, I would not be surprised in the slightest they reverse this.
- LightBug1 5mo agoExcellent news.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoI don't understand how Palantir managed to sell their services outside of the US, given their deep ties to CIA, political positions and involment with US goverments.
- CommanderData 5mo ago"Peter Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, until its collapse, and Mandelson took the prime minister, Keir Starmer, on a trip to Palantir’s Washington DC showroom. " Bribery.
- roughly 5mo agoBecause until recently that was part of the sales pitch. The post-WW2 political order was that the US Govt was the security guarantor for the "western world," which meant countries allied with the US traded an almost unparalleled security guarantee for things like dollar hegemony and trade policies they probably wouldn't have acceded to otherwise. The Iraq war severely strained that bargain, and Trump's effectively broken it, but for the entire latter half of the 20th century, "this company is part of the American Military-Industrial Technosphere" was why you did business with them.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoWouldn’t that also describe every single US tech and defense contractor? The fact it has deep ties to cia is probably seen as a benefit to the leadership of our allies. Maybe their own public sour on that but you can be sure behind closed doors they are in lockstep with the actual aims of our deep state intelligence services.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoThe thing is that while EU is allied with the US, they are also competitors in many markets. Airbus is using Palantir services. The competition between Boeing and Airbus has often be brutal and dirty, and considered significant at the state level. The fact that a company like Palantir be allowed to insert themselves in the software infrastructure of a critical company that is often working against the interest of the US seems very weird to me.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoWhy is that weird? Airbus probably relies on windows pcs too along with the rest of europe.
- sph 5mo agoIt's called corruption. Politicians are particularly prone to this issue.
- nashadelic 5mo agowhats even more confusing is that the Middle East Palantir team is almost all Chinese ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cyberge99 5mo agoThey probably don’t care about Middle East geopolitics.
- tetris11 5mo agoGreat, now kill the NHS deal
- spacedcowboy 5mo ago[flagged]
- badgersnake 5mo agoTories, in particular Steve Barclay and Rishi Sunak
- fmajid 5mo agoAnd Peter Mandelson lobbying for them.
- tomhow 5mo agoPlease don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- LightBug1 5mo agoNot sure why this is flagged !
- spacedcowboy 5mo agoThere's plenty of people on HN who can't think of any reason why America should be criticised, which extends to any American company. It's kind of sad, really.
- _joel 5mo agoHaven't they already handed over all the data though :/
- senderista 5mo agoThe only politicization of technology here was done by the Palantir CEO.
- eruci 5mo agoHis spokesperson said Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”. I wander if they'd care to further elaborate on that.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoNot paying the people helping bomb children in Gaza and Iran is a good start.
- eruci 5mo agois that so?
- herrherrmann 5mo agoYes.
- spacedcowboy 5mo agoPalantir is effectively a US spy company, and let's face it, even Iran have a better international rep than the US right now. He's just reading the room - no-one wants to be associated with the current US regime, and given Trump's specific dislike of him (you know, because he's not white), he probably doesn't seem to see much reason to beat about the bush. The US has proven to be a bad international partner, they flout international law, they engage in piracy, their political system is prone to rapid and catastrophic change, and the people there seem to be just fine with electing a narcissistic fraudulent rapist and felon as president. Twice. Not just "No" but "Hell, No!" [ITT: Watch the butt-hurt USAsians downvote because they're not used to someone telling it as it is about the USA]
- eruci 5mo agoSaying Iran has a better international reputation than the United States is a massive stretch, but yes, this is emotional decision making.
- lenerdenator 5mo agoWe're going to need to send people to prison when this is all said and done if we're ever going to get other countries' business back.
- testfrequency 5mo agoI posted this 5 hours ago and confusingly only received 4 upvotes: Sadiq Khan blocks £50M Met police deal with Palantir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221296
- drtz 5mo agoAnd this new thread was just demoted from the front page despite a lot of activity and upvotes in a short time.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoPLTR employees hiding things that make them feel bad?
- pesus 5mo agoAnything critical of Palantir or mass surveillance in general tends to get auto flagged / downvoted very quickly. It's a bit ironic for a site calling itself Hacker News, but it's also very fitting and not surprising that a tech site these days is being influenced so heavily by bots/llms.
- testfrequency 5mo agoThe only reason I shared that I posted this earlier is in part that I found it incredibly odd it didn’t get traction (it’s a big deal!). Seeing now that this post may be limited, my tin foil hat gets placed back on. It’s not like Palantir is a fan of YC, they literally sued them…
- bromuk 5mo agoI think a good consideration here is how would the outcry be if it was a Chinese company being woven into governmental and national health systems.
- fmajid 5mo agoWell, UK Power Networks, the main electric grid for London and most of South-East England was owned by a Hong Kong company until recently (they sold it to the French). So basically Xi Jinping had the power to unplug the British Government at the snap of a finger.
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoBeing owned by a foreign company is not the same as embedding technology controlled by a foreign intelligence service deep into your infrastructure. The hypothetical snap of the finger from Beijing to shut down power in London (assuming that local operatives would indeed comply, which is not given) could have been easily reverted in a few hours with a snap of the finger from London to replace key people in the company hierarchy or place the company under public administration.
- whywhywhywhy 5mo agoChina doesn't have nuclear weapon defense infrastructure on UK soil so it's not really comparable.
- wrs 5mo ago>A recent Met police trial of Palantir’s AI to monitor staff behaviour... To be fair, the Met should get a little credit for applying Palantir to themselves first.
- figbert 5mo agoMy understanding of Palantir's actual, technical offering is profoundly boring: a hosted platform that connects to existing diverse sources of data and organizes them according to well-defined (by Palantir's FDEs) useful schemas. I have developed this impression through actually building a product on the Foundry as well as several rounds of interviews. Frankly that is profoundly boring. The anti-Palantir propaganda, portraying them as this all-powerful Skynet software, is as much a part of their marketing as anything else. On the other hand, their effectiveness appears to be less in question: the article above claims that Scotland Yard found hundreds of police officers to have been abusing their posts in various ways through use of the Palantir system. I am not a fan of corrupt cops, so I think this is good. Similar stories exist elsewhere, like a 68% reduction in 48-hour mortality at a Tampa hospital through deployment of Palantir's anti-sepsis monitoring tech. Thus I arrive at the conclusion that this decision is ultimately a loss. Khan's legal standing appears to rely on them not investigating other potential suppliers—I'm not sure that there are any, and "develop these simple data systems in-house" is a bad option because if they could have they would. I suppose ultimately I don't think that Palantir's "bad vibes" among constituents should impact governments' desire to be effective in the programs they purport implement.
- pesus 5mo agoAnti-Palantir propaganda? You don't need any propaganda when Palantir's actions speak for themselves. > ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt “illegal immigrants” https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168 https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168 > ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ https://www.404media.co/ice-just-paid-palantir-tens-of-millions-for-complete-target-analysis-of-known-populations/ https://www.404media.co/ice-just-paid-palantir-tens-of-milli... > Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-americans https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-amer... > Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticias/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia... This is far more than just "bad vibes", and just a handful of many examples. The vibes also tend to be pretty bad around things that are used to enable spying, a secret police force, or bombing children. This isn't even touching on the name of the company itself and the origin of that name, or the fact that Peter Thiel founded it, or many of the other things that give it "bad vibes".
- hobofan 5mo agoI'm wondering how this will effect the Palantir London office, which is their biggest European office. Local employment has often been a pawn in deals like this (see e.g. Microsoft & Munich), so I'm positively surprised to see a major with a spine here.
- amriksohata 5mo agoPossibly blocking it from pressure from his own community that it might be used against them? Similar to how Birmingham CCTV cameras were blocked by certain members of the communities in Birmingham as they thought they were spying on them. Anyway its a conflict of interest that a Mayor that is not a technocrat decides what software the Police uses. Seems so wrong.