Palantir has no place in UK public services | Hacker News Reader

Palantir has no place in UK public services

opendemocracy.net

279 pointsjethronethro88 comments

Correct. Neither do Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple - realistically they're even more dangerous, see the ICC. Ironically the first three being the main hosts of.. you guessed it, Palantir.

Picking and choosing US big tech in this context is pointless, they're all as much of a risk as each other. And don't come with "you have to start somewhere", because you do, but then the place to start is slowly step-by-step getting off of the most critical ones, which are the first four I mentioned.

It seems like there's a big opportunity for someone to hire a bunch of disenfranchised US devs that want to flee the country to build an EU-native cloud platform - but clearly there's enough talent on the continent already, so why hasn't this happened yet?

Because it’s not a dev problem, it’s a sales problem.

The sales problem being there isn't anything viable to compete with the established players. Europe has the capability, even without immigration from the US, it just needs a kick to make good enough products.

The EU should also create a new regulation to force everyone on the continent to move away from American companies. That’s one way to give the local startups a market to sell to.

I’d be interested in arguments that EU providers could be equivalent to Azure … is it realistic to move a large university across for email and other cloud services? Might be the right time to start campaigning for institutions to divest from US tech stacks…

What products are so hard to replace?

People usually choose big tech from a mix of CYA, sales pitches, preferences for known brands, and political reasons such as enabling surveillance.

It is much more complicated than that.

(1) Europe has a fragmented market; linguistically, product wise (2) Silicon Valley is in the United States (3) The United States has a very large amount of capital to throw at companies (4) even if you managed to succeed in the EU your shares will most likely be bought out from under you if you raised capital (5) all of the above re-inforce each other over time

Once you have that kind of an advantage it is very hard to lose it.

It is worth noting that only one of the “big three” clouds is in Silicon Valley - indeed, much of the original development work on what became AWS was done in South Africa!

It has! Here's a whole list of them, but others might exist too!

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...

Among other things, with everything going on in the US today, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon were apparently at the WH for a screening of the Melania film.

Amazon funded it. They paid $30 million or so for rights to the documentary for Amazon Prime. I doubt viewers will care about it, but I look at it as a bribe from Amazon to the administration. They give Melania and by extension Trump this money, and they will get better regulatory help and more government contracts.

I didn't even know this existed, let alone that it was made by Amazon. This makes their Chris Pratt garbage look like cinema.

It's easy to start with Palantir because it simply doesn't provide any legitimate value. They don't do anything, at all, other than enable spying by weaving snippets of private data into a coherent whole. You don't have to explain the decision to well-meaning people who are inconvenienced, nor provide a transition plan for essential services, you can just yank the plug tomorrow and tell everyone who complains to buzz off.

Incoming big-tech sympathizers with defense contracts, boosters and hairsplitters in 3, 2, 1.

"No way, not a cent of my nest egg funded by papa Bezos comes from AWS FedRAMP High GovCloud massive sweet enterprise contracts with the likes of Palantir to host them at scale!"

The truth is there's thousands if not tens of thousands of people on here for whom it is incredibly convenient to imagine their vests were granted in a completely different universe to the likes of Palantir. Deep down they know their companies realistically play an unfathomably bigger role in surveillance capatalism, crippling addictions, furthering of current US Party strongarming and a whole lot more. Exactly why many find it so cathartic to latch on to these threads and reinforce that cognitive dissonance.

I didn't even mention Meta who bring about as much harm in a day as Palantir wish it could do in a year - make no mistake, I'm not suggesting the latter is for a lack of trying. Although the idea that Zuck is somehow any more ethical than Thiel is of course hilarious.

But after all, you and me too are quite culpable in this moment, providing marketing and engagement for the platform behind Flock(YC S17). The exact source of all that data we're so angry about being loaded into the Palantir platforms.

Correct.

I expect the author of the article must also recognize that Big Tech is in the same basket and are just as complicit for the sake of consistency. The problem is, we just don't hear about it often.

When I brought this up last time in [0] all I saw was constant hairsplitting, attempts to seperate Big Tech from Palantir and lots of 'whataboutism' accusations, which doesn't work because I agree.

So when I saw this in the article:

> Palantir’s tentacles are already extending into our communities. In my constituency of Coventry, the Labour-run council awarded the company a £500,000 contract to develop an AI tool for children’s services.

Google [1], Microsoft [2], Amazon [3] are no different and these are just a few of them and they are just as bad as Palantir and all of them are in the SNP 500 directly in the portfolios of pension funds.

So it is indeed a waste of time trying to picking and choose US tech companies on this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634759/Google-wins-mu...

[2] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2023/06/nhs-signs-new-microsof...

[3] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366566172/AWS-secures-89...

You put it perfectly, and I have the exact same experience. If the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google weren't super eager to partner with the likes of Palantir from day one, the latter would never have gotten off of the ground.

> When I brought this up last time in [0] all I saw was constant hairsplitting, attempts to seperate Big Tech from Palantir and lots of 'whataboutism' accusations

Another one I often see is the "but Peter Thiel" (as in a reply to my initial comment, but also in the threads you're talking about), as if other big tech CEOs such as Bezos and Zuckerberg have even one extra moral fiber in their body that puts them in a notably different category.

Do you happen to have a (semi-)public presence anywhere? It's hard to find people who understand this and are honest about it, and inherently harder than simply joining one of the bigger tribes, whether it's the HN "other big tech isn't nearly as bad" one, or the shoulder-shrugging crowd.

Read up on Peter Thiel.

Oh, he's a scourge. But he's no different from the other big tech CEOs. Read up on Mark Zuckerberg. [0][1][2][3][4][5], not even including the infamous quote about trusting him.

Could easily make such a list about Bezos et al too.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... - FYI there are much better sources on this one, which put it beyond doubt that they knew they were the number one catalyst in an ethnic cleansing and gave absolutely zero shits.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/meta-whistleblower-sarah-w...

[5] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

Let's rewrite that: any big US tech company has no place in any EU or Asian or African public service. Public services should be as independent and as sovereign as technically feasible.

In a few moments from now, you'll be flow out of your country to face Omerican justice. Good bye, fren.

I'd be surprised if they cannot provide services which translate to outcomes successive governments want. So in that sense, "has no place" is about alignment to goals, as much as desires. Palantir is able to do things which the government wants done. If this pits government against citizenry in terms of what people think, thats not unusual.

The big-4 would happily also do this. Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC Would take money to provide outlines and project management for an in-house, or an outsource to somebody other than Palantir. It wouldn't neccessarily be either cheaper, or faster, or for that matter any more socially acceptable.

I don't like the source, I could agree with the opinion (broken clock write 2x a day..) but to pretend government doesn't want what Palantir is selling is faux naieve and stupid.

What alternative is there, and why is "don't do it" viable?

This is "defund the police" wolf howling at the moon stuff.

We’re at good point with European alternatives

https://www.intelligenceonline.com/europe-russia/2025/12/02/...

Somewhat ironic that this is fronted by CloudFlare.

The more I read about Palantir, the creepier and weirder it becomes. The CEO brags about wanting to kill all journalists with fentanyl, or brags about how their software will be used to kill people, and how readily they're willing to work for the convicted fraudster that America felt fit to give the nuclear codes.

And despite this company being creepy and weird and bizarre and secretive, they are also trying to make themselves a lifestyle brand by selling merchandise. If I felt like spending $150 for a Palantir-based hoodie, I guess I can normally do that [1], but disturbingly it is apparently "sold out". Apparently a lot of people really want to buy an overpriced sweater, or maybe they're trying to preemptively buy social credit.

Who knows. Everything is terrible.

[1] https://store.palantir.com/

Ironically, the Danish Government is a heavy user of Palantir systems, including creepy predictive policing solutions.

I would be keen to know if citizen data is being handled correctly, following GDPR/LED.

Given previous Danish client-state-like cooperation with NSA to spy on other EU countries, I can imagine the answer.

> including creepy predictive policing solutions.

Minority Report coming right up.

Which predictive policing solution from palantir are they using?

Their local Palantir implementation is called POL-INTEL. This thesis presents a good critical overview [1].

[1] https://en.itu.dk/-/media/EN/Research/PhD-Programme/PhD-defe...

GDPR has carveouts for governments and law enforcement so they can do whatever for those purposes.

The framework is the one I referred to (EU LED). In Denmark, LED is implemented in the Danish Law Enforcement Act.

However, LED has some purpose limitations, which critics argue the Danish Law Enforcement Act has bypassed. Some are trying to challenge it.

I love how powerful the GDPR marketing was that it made people forget that there are massive exceptions for prevention of crime and for the government

Aww, they’re sold out

I know! How will I get Alex Karp to notice me now????

Karp is a philosopher by training that has fallen into ideological blindness. He claims that he is on the right side of history. Democracies need Palantir badly.

He preaches his views to his employees. No one in his flock seems to wonder what would happen if their tools were to be used against democracy.

I just find it odd, because their entire business depends on being a creepy entity that has access to "all the data". There would be no reason for ICE or any government organization to actually use their services if they didn't have access to a lot of data that they didn't.

By that kind of reasoning the Mafia is doing just great.

Not everything is about money.

Karp is a philosopher who had to look at humanity as it is without the idealizations. Longtermism, dark enlightenment, yada ya.. all just fancy terms for enlightenment, actual progress. Not the delusions that you can talk yourself into when high on resources.

The points made while on drugs are worse than worthless they are dangerous to longterm survival and those who engage in this are deeply amoral. Most of humanity is basically glorified stoners, congratulating themselves on how high they get while their futures starve. The opinion of the retarded about the warden is always that he is evil.

Go, get yourself some access to a database collected from the seeing stones(aka cellphones) and write your own behavioural queries. Look at the damage and weep. Realize the best we can manage is stabilization in shitty conditions because the warmode species is to retarded. And then go on the web and listen to the blabber of the retarded. Fusion and mini reactors will save civilzation. Meanwhile they handed out proliferation "tracking nukes" aka lookalikes with gps) in every war since the coldwar and guess what the fanatics already have blown it up, several times. Thats why panopticon, thats why electric drugs (games), thats why scenario root hardening, including hardening against government tribalist retardation. Go buy yourself a hoodie. Oh, and its all good, we are going to mars.

> Meanwhile they handed out proliferation "tracking nukes" aka lookalikes with gps) in every war since the coldwar and guess what the fanatics already have blown it up, several times.

Interesting, plausible, and yet something I have never heard of before despite believing myself relatively well-read. Do you have a source for this, even if it was an unverified leak?

This reads like someone who replaced thinking with the word “creepy” and hit paste until it felt like an opinion. If your critique is just moral panic (and I guess merch anxiety) you’re not exposing anything … and speaking of merch, their Karp “Dominate” shirt is absolutely killer

The moral panic is justified, if you take 5 minutes to look into what they do, and who's behind it (YC's own neo-nazi billionaire, Peter Theil, of course, who is actively undermining western democracy and norms in conjunction with Trump, his hand-picked puppet JD Vance, and so on). For example, they created the facial recognition database and national surveillance system that ICE is literally currently using to hunt down and kidnap, torture, deport, and murder political dissenters who have previously been recorded taking part in their right to protest.

If you are too lazy to Google all of that -- it's all fact, not conjecture -- here's one more thing:

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". -Peter Theil, Palantir founder.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117

I'm sorry, which forum do you think you're on? This isn't a fucking "publication", it's a discussion forum for a bunch of software geeks. I'm not trying to "expose" anything, I'm saying that when I read about how much crap they do, how much they work with ICE, and how deeply unlikable the CEO is, then yeah they're creepy. It really is just an "opinion", so you trying to call that out shows a lack of comprehension of the forum and honestly the English language as a whole.

Frankly, I think the fact that you're so willing to simp for a creepy billionaire and a creepy multi-billion dollar company so much as to call one of their shirts "absolutely killer" says a lot more about you than anything else.

The UK is building/has built a surveillance state using the boiling frog method. So even if you change vendors, surveillance will continue. You have accepted it as par for the course. Unless you reject it and subsequent politicians don't double-cross you, surveillance will continue. No question.

UK society has always been surprisingly tolerant of mass surveillance. Whether Palantir is involved or not, I think it may be too late to get off the train.

I know UK is ok with surveillance in public places because there is no expectation of privacy in public spaces. But are they really tolerant of surveillance in non-public places?

No, not at all. The surveillance state nonsense is overplayed online.

Brit here. Yes because the average Brit is insufficiently educated to understand the harm. They are very easily swayed by "think of the children" or saving just one life. They consume huge amounts of propaganda with little to zero critical thinking

There is a great UK tv show about the surveillance state, from 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series)

It’s something that always horrified me, but it was just done without the governments help, they just let private individuals do it and gave away public spaces to private interests

Just like the US, saying "immigrants" and "crime" gets the public, or at least the media, to demand authoritarianism.

It's unclear whether the perpetrators of sexual assault and pedophilia were Palantir or the CCP and Prince Holding Group. The latter has long established a very thorough surveillance system in China. While Western leaders and business figures frequently have close contact with China, the world's second-largest economy, Western society consistently overlooks both China's power and its potential for malicious activity. The correct approach is to consider both.

The petition is now a 404.

It's hard not to see a sort of oligarchy vs the people battle shaping up, that's for sure.

Yeah, it's important to elect councillors and MP's that represent the people and not monied interests.

Problem is that you must already represent monied interests before you get anywhere near an MP/councillor seat.

Well, protesting is illegal now

It's not illegal, you just get shot is all

First one by one but slowly getting to Iran levels. If it feels unthinkable, the current events were unthinkable three years ago.

Shot and immediately branded a violent terrorist by the highest levels of government.

It's a bit of a catch-22 that they keep shooting and lying about the people who are filming them shooting people to provide evidence that they lie about what happens.

In which country? In the one I live in, its still alive and well

UK...

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