>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...