Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

This whole article is bizarre. Imagine an article saying “UK government set to extract hospital data to Excel without patient consent”. Or “SQLite”. Or “Amazon RDS”. Or “Microsoft 365”. Or “Google Sheets”. Or “IBM”.

Palantir is, as far as I can tell, not a building full of giant disks and evil arch-villains trying to make billions of dollars by looking at your personal data. Nor is it an advertising or data company (like Google or Meta or Equifax) trying to make billions of dollars off your personal data. It’s a software and SaaS company selling tools and a consultancy helping clients use them.

So maybe someone here is up to no good with someone’s data, but this is not at all implied by anyone’s mere use or Palantir.

To the extend anything nefarious is going on, I would imagine that someone is overpaying and/or receiving an underperforming service. Think about everything Accenture is infamous for.

> This whole article is bizarre. Imagine an article saying “UK government set to extract hospital data to ... “Microsoft 365” or “Google Sheets”

Or to Yandex or another system controlled by a foreign government. What gives you the impression someone else is at liberty to take my data ant put into a place where it will be stolen>?

Maybe they should consider rebranding, then. The word comes from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series - the palantir were telepathic communication devices which were often used to deceive others by showing selective truths and lies of omission.

That describes what they do perfectly.

Not really. They are in the business of spying on every living human being and offering that as a service to more or less scrupulous agencies.

Citation needed. They are certainly in the business of selling software that is useful for those who spy on people. But where is any actual evidence that Palantir spies on anyone?

(I have no particular interest in Palantir.)

They offer SaaS only.

so I believe this initiative is problematic but I feel activists are shooting themselves in the foot talking about privacy and conspiracy. The issue is lock-in -- the authority is mandating compatibility with proprietary Palantir feature sets (for example approach to federation and access control) and use at a local level (outside NHS-E) as a cost saving measure (the cost saving part means replace not dual operate 2 platforms). This is signaled strongly here and in the FDP procurement.

Well, regarding evil arch-villains, they have Peter Thiel, so one could argue about that…

https://youtu.be/S-Jo-djilvo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com