Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

The expectation is that companies like Palantir should not exist at all. Their core business is surveilling innocent people en masse.

View on HN

That is not their core business. Their core business is data analysis. If I remember from some tech book, they were spun out from the fraud department in PayPal detecting fraudulent transactions and then selling services to FBI.

I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases.

Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not like they are a face recognition camera company or something.

I’m not employed by Palantir and not a fan or anything, but am surprised at how mischaracterized they seem to be.

> Their core business is data analysis.

This is like saying Raytheon's core business is antennas. Yes, Palantir does data analysis, specifically for ICE, the military and the police.

Palantir is private so hard to know revenue breakdown. But hard to believe that over 50% of their revenue (what I would consider core) comes from ICE, military and police.

I found this article [0] from 2018 that said half of its $1B in revenue comes from government and the other half from corporate.

So if every penny of government work comes from ICE and ICE-likes maybe that’s core.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com