Hacker News Reader

Comment by iheartnetwork | Hacker News Reader

That's a weird comment. From what the OP described, the software is a data visualization tool. Palantir the company doesn't hold the data based on what the OP said. The govt or whoever gathered the data would be the owner of the data. It doesn't appear the Palantir software itself does the original data gather.

View on HN

Right. But the data tool is designed to be integrated across municipalities via a shared schema -- this fundamentally changes the efficacy of the data -- it makes the data more valuable.

Palantir Gotham is used by the LA police department and the data integration creates new capabilities -- even if they keep the data. At the end of the day there will always be a trade-off between crime and surveillance. Palantir explicitly sides with surveillance.

It really doesn't matter who owns the data etc. The moral position of Palantir is very clear: that it supports surveillance.

Not sure why you're specifically against Palantir. Tableau basically does the same thing. Excel did it before either product. Police, NSA, CIA, FBI use Excel, AWS, GCP, Oracle, twitter, tor, bitcoin (insert any tech product) etc... If Palantir supports surveillance because their product can be integrated with municipal data, then virtually every tech company supports a surveillance state because any tool can be leveraged by these law enforcement entities to surveil a population more effectively.

what type of double speak is this? They literally sell data integration products with a specific focus on defense and police departments.

What you're implying is that someone that sells uranium to people that build bombs is just "a chemical supplier" .... like yeah the essence of what they are doing is the same, but the implications are totally different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com