It's no consolation to me that a company is giving transcripts of my personal conversations and medical records to the American government instead of the Chinese. I don't want you to collect my damned data. Period.
It's not like Palantir is selling hamburgers to millions of faceless individuals. They themselves want to take the responsibility for their consulting for government agencies. I assign responsibility to them, too.
Can you think of examples of amoral company decisions from history? I can...
"Our bank just facilitated the deposit of enormous quantities of paper money. We didn't do the drug-smuggling."
"Our company simply supplied The Republic of ___ with ammunition. That was our only involvement."
"The government needed to sort incoming prisoners by religion. We merely won the bid to do the data-processing."
My point is you should be directing your criticism to government data collection practices that enable them to have data to process, once that 1st step is achieved, it doesn't matter who achieves step 2, 3, 4 or beyond, so your focus on Palantir is fleeting at best.
> My point is you should be directing your criticism to government data collection practices
The point is that there is enough culpability to go around.
Re: my examples (in the same order)...
HSBC https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-usa-idUSKBN1E50YA
EDO MBM Technology ltd https://www.undocs.org/en/S/2018/594
IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
It's a reasonable position to complain about a company who knowingly enables bad behaviour of a third party, even if they don't directly carry it out.
Tell me: is the bus driver culpable if the murderer took the bus to get away from the scene of the crime?
If so, I'll reserve some hate for MS, too.
With billions of people on this planet, some terrorist kingpin and I might have the same birthmark on our ankle. Thanks to the work Palantir does, that could result in law enforcement swatting me, or worse. That is sickening.
Collecting is bad and should be outlawed, but analyzing is the bigger threat.
Vast amounts of data in aggregate are useless. It's like a school of fish, the probability of any single one being targeted is difficult.
When you start applying tools that can identify the fish, now its a problem.
Again, I'm not sure if you understand what it is Palantir does. The fish is already identified: the government knows your name, your address, etc. The challenge lies not in identifying the fish, but identifying which fish are doing bad things.
To take a concrete example: Palantir was used to identify fraudulent pharmacies (aka "Pill Mills") and drug dealers using said pharmacies. Previously, analysts would sort purchases of certain classes of drugs by amount, and investigate from there. Drug dealers adapted by making multiple, smaller purchases none of which were large enough to attract the attention from analysts.
Using Palantir, analysts were able to identify people purchasing the same drugs on the same day at different pharmacies. That is suspicious. In addition to that, Palantir let them plot these purchases on a map, and link to a street view of the address. Clear patterns emerged, where dealers would purchase moderate quantities of drugs along a stretch of highway, often from pharmacies that did not have any external signage indicated that the building was a pharmacy. The government's ability to enforce laws is enhanced, but the data collected remains unchanged.