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Manuel_D

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You’re calling people who critique Palantir “borderline Q-Anon” ?

While you yourself think Palantir’s products are “like Excel” ?

They are not. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes; if a company is concerned with privacy should think twice before handling it to Palantir, even if with all the assurances they might give in terms of data governance.

> This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes;

You realize that this is not mutually exclusive with what I just wrote?

Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.

Even if Palantir only "processes" the data you have to assume they are making their own copies of it if they want to

It's not like tech companies deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to trust anymore, if they ever did

> Palantir builds software for military and security purposes. But the customers don't give this data to Palantir, custody of this data remains with the customer.

How is that possible if Palantir software runs on machines Palantir controls?

1. on prem 2. extremely strict data controls, if one of palantirs big customers found out data got leaked people are going to prison

Amen.

People seem to struggle with the concept of private datacenters these days. Palantir customers tend to be the sorts of orgs that are pretty paranoid about their data, and they wouldn't be handing it over to some schmucks without being confident that those concerns were addressed. Militaries and governments generally aren't fuckin around with things like intelligence data, so I think it's reasonable that Palantir is able to make a convincing case to the world's most paranoid orgs that their data isn't being sent anywhere (and it'd likely be air gapped anyway).

Just because everything you touch is in the cloud doesn't mean other orgs aren't still building their own datacenters and then buying software to run inside.

You think people go to prison for this sort of thing? How laughably quaint.

yes

am close with a few employees there

The on prem solution is probably 2X TCO of the hosted solution. I'm sure many orgs that should be strictly "on prem" are running hosted solutions due to budgetary concerns.

Heh, the fact that they aren’t mutually exclusive is the problem. Why give someone with mass surveillance ops in other domains access to yet another domain?

This is like saying a Swiss bank would share your secrets because shady people use Swiss banks. No. Confidentiality is literally built into their business model. Getting caught sharing customer data is one of the fastest ways for their business to crumble.

How many times are we gonna have to see businesses get caught sharing customer data before we learn to not just trust them?

What software from what companies do you use to store your personal data?

Being a customer of a bank and being in a Palantir dataset is not the same. The people in the data are not the customers of Palantir.

I’m sorry what? Confidentiality is built into palantirs business model? Do you even know who Palantir is? Your analogy makes zero sense

What’s up with all these Palantir shills in this thread

How does it not make sense? Companies all over the world trust their proprietary data with Palantir platforms. There’s no way they would do this if they thought Palantir was actually sharing data without their approval. If they were found out to have done this, companies would cease to trust Palantir and stop working with them

Palantirs main function is collecting massive amounts of data and mining it.

You and all the trolls in this thread can keep playing dumb

According to the article:

> It also includes a line stating that with permission from the city agency, Palantir can “de-identify” patients’ protected health information and use it for “purposes other than research”.

Under HIPPA, "research" has a very specific definition which renders "purposes other than research" quite broad. Yes, it's "with permission" but it does depend on the city agency fully understanding what ancillary things Palantir can do with de-identified data once it has left the covered entity and without further explicit permission.

while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...

And 365 (I'm sure there is an on-premises version, but when not).

I really have never heard of on prem 365 deployments, I think any confidentiality is handled via contracted promises with legal ramifications for breaking. With Azure GovCloud for instance there’s no encryption / user key custody on the one drive side, everything you do is uploaded to Microsoft and they maintain keys, they just hire people who passed a background check to run the infrastructure, US nationals only etc

There is on prem office.

Government and 365 is weird.

Non-military entities use “Government Community Cloud”, which is an environment where data is stored in segmented areas of Microsoft data centers, but everything else is on commercial infrastructure.

You absolutely can host keys as a customer.

The Microsoft approach to all of this stuff is insane.

Good to know, I shouldn't be surprised anything is possible once you get into having an account executive catering to you.

Not for org/enterprise licenses.

There is virtually no consequences or accountability when big-tech companies share private data. For crying out loud, they were caught red handed sharing private data from their EU endeavors.

If even sovereign states with clear laws forbidding such behavior can't keep those companies in check, no enterprise/b2b can.

Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it's use.

How do I decline it?? I keep clicking no, hide, not interested, cancel, etc. but it keeps showing up and activating...if I had a nickel for every time I clicked it on accident in Azure because a layout shift moved it under my mouse when trying to press a button I would have a lot of nickels. It even showed up as an app on my phone because I guess the Office 365 entry got hijacked...

Your Entra Admin like your Google workspace admin can publish or remove features from user availability.

It’s named evil corp. On purpose.

> Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data

After DOGE, a movement Palantir aided [1], I think it's fair for folks to wonder to what degree these firms have been infiltrated by extremists. Someone who will convince themselves that exporting data to ICE or the Proud Boys—like the names of every New Yorker whose medical records say they are gay, circumcised or have had an abortion—is the right thing to do. (Or at least funny and inconsequential.)

It's a risk. Not a conclusion. But given Palantir's offering is becoming less differentiated by the day, I think it's fair for people to look for alternatives.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-doge-irs-mega-api-data/

I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.

They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.

In fairness to Microsoft, when the XLS file format was first defined about 40 years ago all of their competitors also used proprietary file formats. Back then open file formats for complex, structured data weren't really a thing. I suppose in theory they could have used SGML but that wouldn't have been very practical given the severely limited hardware resources at the time.

People should not use proprietary formats for obvious reasons, but XLS has been largely reverse engineered.

They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-os...

Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.

The concern is more with the tools that Palantir creates around the domains they service. They analyze, predict, and shape decisions using unproven technology. Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes, and given the anti-democratic and frankly unhinged extremist worldviews of the founders, it's highly concerning to allow them to create tools for sensitive and nuanced data that have life or death consequences.

> Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes,

No, Palantir's customers are the ones gleaning insights. To re-use the Excel analogy, this is like saying Microsoft is controlling insights and outcomes because organization use Excel.

Palantir's products are not Excel. Palantir's founders and executives are well aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.

As far as I know, Microsoft executives don't brag about Excel being used to create a unified "kill chain" [1], nor do they market software intended for targeting for weapons of mass destruction [2], nor do they claim that their products are designed for use in lethal military operations [3].

As much as you'd like to hand-waive away their role, a war profiteer is a war profiteer. IBM also used to just make computers to manage supply chains in WW2; who they sold it to, the purposes it was used for, and why they sold it is still important. Based on interviews, Thiel and Karp are gleeful about their role in the military-industrial complex and embrace it [4], so likening their products to Excel is disingenuous at best.

[1] https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

[3] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Palantir-defends-its-role-in-th...

[4] https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes

But wouldn't all of that apply to Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Motors, Colt, Browning, and countless more companies that don't just build software for the military but actual weaponry? Yet those companies don't receive even a fraction of the hate that Palantir does.

Many people (myself included) have a lot to say about those companies as well. But their existence doesn't excuse Palantir, the company at the focus of the article that we're discussing in this thread. We're on a tech-focused forum which is probably why you hear more about tech-first companies here like Palantir and Anduril than "legacy" weapons manufacturers.

if custody is with the customer.....why does palantir have compute pricing.....

hmmmmmm

Why would anyone knowingly use Isreali spyware?

> Custody of the data remains with the customer.

Yea.. like.. how, though?

Here are their setup instructions. It seems pretty clear what is happening to your data, and an unqualified statement that you maintain some nebulous idea of "custody" seems oblivious to even simple risk.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/data-connection/initia...

This isn't even getting into their "forward deployed software engineers" or how that whole aspect of their "product" works.

You can run it on-prem, where you can actually technologically enforce data custody.

Custody enforcement using the cloud hosted product, is mostly contractual, although they do offer some technical features, like encrypting all data using a AWS KMS key in the customer's AWS account.

Still, this relies on trusting that they won't make their own separate copies of the data.

> Custody of the data remains with the customer

pinky promise?

Well, they are to some degree.

Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so' (theregister.com)

76 points by fauigerzigerk 6 months ago | 7 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153

In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.

That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all

Most Epic products aggressively isolate data. The majority of instances are run on-premises, and even those hosted on cloud platforms are single-tenant. They have a good record for data security and privacy; afaik all Epic data breaches were actually caused by infiltration of other customer systems.

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