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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Palantir is much closer to a consulting agency (think SAP or IBM) than anything like that.

If a company is building the tools for a surveillance agency (which we know they are), you can't simply wave around the world "consulting" because they are not the end user of said tools to erase all responsibility.

If a gun manufacturer sells weapons to a dictatorship, even if there is no embargo and the deal is legal, you can absolutely judge the scummy ethics of the company in question.

That's a very kind way to characterize their work. Regardless, they are in the mass surveillance business. Some of their product manuals are out there to read.

Edit: I personally think calling them just a 'consulting' company is a silly way to obscure the things on which they consult.

They're in the data analysis business. Your government is in the mass surveillance business. If ICE fed the data into Tableau instead would that be any different?

This is not an accurate comparison you're making and I think you know that. Palantir designs products specifically for mass tracking of people. Tableau does not.

Could you specify the things Palantir does that Tableu and other data analysis tools do not?

I said it already. They make software specifically for tracking populations. Their user manuals were leaked by vice recently. You can look it up. Trying to equate the software described in those manuals, and what we know of their other contracts and products with Tableau is nonsense.

> They make software specifically for tracking population

They make software for modeling objects. A popular object to model is a person. As technologists we should be a little more immune to the FUD spread by Vice et al.

A gas chamber is just a room for dispersing particles very finely. See I can do it too.

That is _exactly_ my point. Using Tableu to track immigrants is really not much different from using Palantir to track them.

You're point is either extremely naive or willfully ignorant.

I don't think you quite understand what Palantir does. It's not the imperious machine for evil you think it is -- the government builds all that stuff in-house.

Yes, I got the same impression from my discussion with him

Please don't gang up on another user no matter how wrong they are.

Stating how I felt about my discussion with a user to another user is not ganging up. He seemed to be defending the company as if he had a personal stake and was acting willfully ignorant. That is an important thing to be aware of, particularly in discussions such as this

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments and especially please don't cross into personal attack.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and using this site in the intended spirit? We'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For some reason I cannot reply to your other comment, so I'll use this one. I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I know what Palantir does, because some of what they HAVE built has leaked into the public. Here's a user manual https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neapqg/300-californian-ci....

This is just one example among many many examples of them developing software specifically for tracking people. Whether they use their generic data model and build atop it or not, they are knowingly building surveillance software and it is being misused. They know. We know. I don't think it's right. You do. We can disagree.

Here's my take: if Palantir were to magically disappear tomorrow nothing would change. ICE would still exist, they would still collect this data, and they would find some other way to analyze it and put it to use -- potentially using technology that's more prone to abuse than Palantir's.

So your base argument is: Palantir is innocent because someone else would do the things they're doing if they were gone? I'm not even sure how to respond to that. You seem to have dropped the point about them making surveillance software now that I have provided an example. You're on to excusing them because someone else could do the awful things they do. That is not a strong argument.

If you click the timestamp you can respond inline.

I never said Palantir is innocent. I didn't weigh in on the morality of it at all, in fact. My point is just that Palantir is just a data consulting company. I posted this comment in another thread concerning your example:

> Take a good look at the screenshots in that link. It's a completely generic database -- you fill in some search fields and some data is returned, you can do a join, and then you can plop that data into a chart. Palantir isn't out there collecting data on citizens or scanning license plates or anything else I would consider "mass surveillance".

How hard do you think it would be to replicate that with Oracle, Tableau, and a few half-decent data scientists? Except at least with Palantir I expect them to do a few important things right, e.g. security.

I'll leave my final thought here: if you're really concerned about mass surveillance focus your energy on the people doing the mass surveillance and not the people selling them some nice-looking dataviz tools.

Thank you for the help! So we agree that Palantir is not innocent. Why then, do we not go after both the people doing the mass surveillance AND the people enabling it? Intent matters.

Because going after Palantir is ultimately futile, even if they were to agree to cease all contracts with ICE very little would change. It is my suspicion that people who think otherwise are doing so out of a misunderstanding of what Palantir's technology actually does.

Really? Like specifically marketing and providing mass surveillance solutions to governments? That's a pretty major thing that Palantir does that other data analysis tools do not. Sure, if you want to keep being pedantic and trying to play off what Palantir does you can say they're "just" a consulting company, or "just" a data analytics company, but it's incredibly apparent that they primarily assist governments and organizations with mass surveillance, and trying to argue otherwise is disingenuous. You can try to pass the buck, but it isn't fooling anyone

What is a "mass surveillance solution"?

Solution: a means of solving a problem or dealing with a difficult situation

Mass surveillance: the distributive close observation of an entire population, or a substantial fraction of the entire population

i.e. a means of observation of a population or subset of a population which is exactly what Palantir does, as has been demonstrated by their leaked documents. Sure, you could probably accomplish something similar with the help of other big data analytics companies, but unlike those companies, Palantir's primary business is aiding in mass surveillance

https://southfront.org/palantirs-user-guide-mass-surveillanc...

Take a good look at the screenshots in that link. It's a completely generic database -- you fill in some search fields and some data is returned, you can do a join, and then you can plop that data into a chart. Palantir isn't out there collecting data on citizens or scanning license plates or anything else I would consider "mass surveillance".

If you want to continue to be disingenuous and try to play off Palantir as a run of the mill big data company that is fine, but their business model is implementing and assissting with mass surveillance and I don't know a single individual in the field that is aware of Palantir that considers them "just a consulting company" or interchangeable with tableau or something similar as you seem to be arguing

Again I'll ask -- what do you think Palantir is doing that makes them so different?

As I've already stated, how they market themselves, who they market themselves to, the governments/organizations/companies they've worked with, the company's history, statements from the company's founder, etc. In fact, I've found hardly any sources on Palantir that don't mention their work on mass surveillance. Your comments come off a lot like the comments of Facebook engineers when I discuss Facebook's mass surveillance. Regardless of what you think, the majority opinion seems to be that Palantir is largely a mass surveillance big data company (because they are).

Wow, I would have never guessed that Coca-Cola, Kimberly-Clark, Hershey, Home Depot, and Walmart were all in on the mass surveillance business [1].

Anyways -- agree to disagree. My personal take is that once the mass surveillance has been conducted the cat's out of the bag. Once the LAPD started scannning license plates it doesn't really matter if they're using Palantir to search the data or a bunch of interns sifting through it by hand. The only thing we can do is get the LAPD and the LA City Government to be accountable to their citizens.

1. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/williamalden/inside-pal...

Could you explain that? I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets. I understand that as with any large-scale implementation, a good portion of their actual project dollars will come from billable hours to get it running and keep it running, but they're certainly not run like an actual consulting company.

Also, neither SAP nor IBM are consulting companies. SAP is an ERP provider and IBM is a cloud-based solution provider and outsourcing company. Most people would say consulting companies are those like Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG, etc.

I think consulting in tech sometimes means custom software solution with a lot of engineers on loan, often deployed to the customer's site.

But despite Palantir's attempts to expand into the private sector, I do believe their government side has been more successful, so I think it's fair to say that Palantir is a government contractor first and foremost.

>I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets

They do

https://southfront.org/palantirs-user-guide-mass-surveillanc...

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/palantirs_sur...

https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-W...

They do! But they don't have the data, these are tools, just like a browser access the web, Palantir solutions access gov data and link to who knows what datasets, but on paper, they ain't no NSA.

SAP and IBM are both absolutely consulting firms, with the caveat that tech consulting means you're actually building solutions for your customers and not just telling them what they should build.

I think the biggest confusion is that Palantir is not in the data collection industry. They make tools to analyze data and contract out consultants (Forward Deployed Engineers) to do the analysis -- but the data is not being sourced by them. There's nothing you can do with Palantir that you couldn't do with any consulting firm or an in-house data-science/data-engineering team. Palantir's value proposition is that they have better tools and smarter people, but there's nothing magical or particularly nefarious about it.

I'm going to continue to disagree on the definition of consulting companies. Consulting companies have billable hours as their primary revenue stream. SAP in Q2 made over 80% of its revenue on cloud and software licenses. It's an ERP company with some consultants, not the other way around. Accenture, in comparison, makes about 75% of its revenue on billable services. I'll give you maybe IBM since their revenue is close to a 50/50 split between billable hours services and infrastructure/application fees depending on how you define the categories in their 10Q.

If anyone has any breakdown for Palantir's revenue by category, I'd love to see it.

I'm not sure why that matters. You can knock on IBM's door with a pile of cash and they'll build your software system for you. I don't doubt that it's a smaller part of their business but it's still analogous to what Palantir does. Pick a different software services company if IBM and SAP don't suit you.

I could also knock on my neighbor's door with a pile of cash and he'd build a shed for me even though he's never swung a hammer in his life. That doesn't mean he's in the business of building sheds, it just means he likes money. Palantir markets itself as a platform and tools vendor, and everything I've seen so far indicates that their primary revenue stream is there, not in professional services.

The actual consulting equivalent of Palantir would be any of the many data science "guns for hire" consultancies floating around that will sell you a few people for $250 an hour to get a project done, then leave.

If he builds you a shed for money he's in the shed-building business. I'm not sure why you're so intent on arguing semantics here.

IBM will build you a system to analyze some data. So will Palantir. Two different firms that offer a similar service. That's the only point I was trying to make.

You're purposely ignoring intent. Palantir has been a surveillance company from it's inception.

I’ve always understood their product to be big data analytics. They pull together the government’s or their customer’s data from disparate sources to allow the data to be more easily used to draw useful conclusions. They aren’t surveilling anyone as far as I’ve seen. That being said, they do apparently assist ICE with utilizing its own data to assist with immigration/border enforcement.

Semantics here are important because calling Palantir just a consultancy and trying to categorize it with other consultancies is disingenuous. It is a company with a platform and toolset specifically built to enable surveillance states. Calling it a consultancy "like IBM" is not a fair characterization of the company.

And no, if you do a thing once for money you are not in that business. That argument is completely ridiculous. You are in the business of whatever you primarily do for money on a regular basis.

It only feels disingenuous because you're not familiar with Palantir's business or offerings. You're not alone in this, most people who have strong opinions on Palantir have them based on lazy journalism from publications who's primary goal is to spread FUD (it's funny how we laugh at the average journalist's understanding of technology until the narrative aligns with our personal beliefs). I tried my best to explain but it seems you've already come to your conclusions.

> There's nothing you can do with Palantir that you couldn't do with any consulting firm or an in-house data-science/data-engineering team. Palantir's value proposition is that they have better tools and smarter people

I agree with this account of what Palantir offers, but it seems like an example of "big enough quantitative differences become qualitative".

Palantir isn't selling data no one else has, and I know the average news scare story about them is ridiculous; they're portrayed like a private NSA even though they don't do primary data gathering at all. (Why doesn't Stratfor draw those hit pieces? Just because they seem less competent and more corporate?) But there's a reason Palantir gets no-bid intelligence agency contracts. What they offer isn't in practice possible for most government agencies or companies to replicate. Part of that is simply competence, but not all of it; Palantir is a data analysis contractor noticeably focused on analyzing humans and finances.

I've seen Palantir do a couple of tech demos aimed at engineers, and they consistently focus on two big things. The first is experience and scale: Palantir has probably dealt with a problem a lot like yours in the past, and has the pre-existing tooling and expertise to produce results much faster than even an equally-competent internal team could. The second is selling human-integrated products, where instead of handing over a data lake or an ML pipeline spitting out probabilities, they provide analysis environments that let human analysts manage lots of data in easily-understood ways, and highlight further data they might wish to integrate. Neither of those things is evil, and I assume the human-integrated stuff is at least partially marketing spin, but I hope its understandable why they would make people nervous.

When people wanted to restrict the National Tracing Center, they restricted it to analog data so that people can only be identified via targeted lookup. Palantir seems to sell the opposite of that; maybe you can't get somebody's phone location without a warrant, but if you can aggregate license plate scanners, automated tolling records, and credit card transactions into a unified model of where they went, maybe you don't need to.

I like your answer but what bothers me:

1. What are the tools we don't know Palantir has? We know a few and while these fit in your description, they're kinda dangerous apps, and this brings me to point 2:

2. Who they sell these to?

Yes and let me remind you that the German branch of IBM supplied the punch card computers and programs for identifying jews in census data in the third reich which enabled the holocaust.

Palantir is doing exactly the same but with much more powerful tools. It is only a matter of time until some government will use their software to commit genocide, not to mention prosecution of political dissidents which is already happening.

Of course Palantir will profit off this and get away with it just like IBM did.

I get downvoted for this every time but someone has to say it. It's the truth whether you like it or not.

Punchcards weren't the problem, Nazis were the problem. Should we be focused on ensuring that every data analysis vendor, worldwide, refuses to sell to our government or should we be focused on ensuring our government doesn't do bad things?

The former is sisyphean, the latter is the most important thing we as a society can do.

This software is a tool that is very easy to abuse, in fact I would go so far to say that its primary purpose is to be abused. Like a gun it has its place in society, but that doesn't absolve you from responsibility when you sell guns to a known dictator. IBM is definitely to blame when they sold their punchcard computers to nazi Germany, knowing that they would be used for genocide (which was not only common knowledge, they even wrote the damn programs!).

You are conflating two separate issues here: The morality of Palantir and their employees and the practicality of stopping abuse.

To get back to the weapons analogy: We may not be able to stop everyone from selling weapons to North Korea but we can surely condemn those who do, wouldn't you agree?

> Punchcards weren't the problem, Nazis were the problem

Nazis are inevitable. Even if you assume that the government actually acquired this software with good intent, you have to anticipate that someone will abuse it. Maybe not today but tomorrow.

> The morality of Palantir and their employees

If the point you're making is that people who work for Palantir are morally akin to people working for the organizers of the Holocaust we'll have to agree to disagree.

If the tools they are making are used for the same purpose then obviously they are. We are not quite at that point yet, but it's not looking good.

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