Say No to Palantir in Europe
action.wemove.eu
action.wemove.eu
"Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe" - https://www.euractiv.com/news/palantir-is-well-on-its-way-to...
https://www.privacynieuws.nl/binnenlands-nieuws/politie-en-j...
> Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
they're giving startups an awful name in the eyes of the people, supposedly by the guy teaching others how to do startups, good grief
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
https://www.ft.com/content/2d2b1af1-edea-4fd0-a081-3811e34bc...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/22/palantir-...
I'm already moving most of my clients out of any US-based offering.
Azure and Jira are sticky, but they'll be out sooner or later.
I think more companies will join the train? Esp new & smaller ones, for sure there is no option for bigCorp like ASML to be free of US-cloud, but maybe its gaining traction.
I paints the picture of it being mostly a hyped marketing wrapper around Nextcloud that hasn't even launched yet.
I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.
All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.
Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?
Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.
There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.
When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?
No. Optimal for employees and customers, which is, in turn, optimal for society.
Making technology choices based on political ideology rather than merit is bad for the interests of both employees and customers.
The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber. With respect, I think you'd benefit from consuming news from a variety of different sources. Think critically about the biases and agendas of the media.
I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-us-israel-war-updates-...
War is an ugly business. Outcomes are rarely so pure that we can single out "good guys" and "bad guys". But hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas, and you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC.
No, nothing hyperbolic whatsoever. Everything I said is trivial to source.
If you believe otherwise then you might follow your own advice - this is all well documented stuff. You can even see the video of those premature babies that were left to rot by Israel, if you don't believe me.
No, I'm not saying that to shock you; it's an important documented fact. Like the prison rapists being celebrated on national Israeli TV, or the zip-tied teenagers run over by steamrollers, or the ambulances shot up and buried in a shallow grave, or Hind Rajab being used as bait for another ambulance, or any of the other thousands upon thousands of well documented atrocities which the US has helped to arm and enable.
> I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday
A kindergarten! Wow. That really is atrocious. Were there 100 schoolgirls in it, like the elementary school America blew up? Your source says no, but you seem really incensed by this property damage.
Is that worse though, in your view, than the 498 Iranian schools [0] targeted in the last months? Is it worse than destroying just about every school and hospital in Gaza?
> War is an ugly business
Being at war doesn't excuse war crimes - especially when the war begins because you don't like how well negotiations are going so you bomb a school killing 100 little girls, while killing the leader of a country with his grandchildren and torpedoing an unarmed ship.
> hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas
To say this after the last three years requires something fundamental to be missing within you. I can not help you find it again. I wish I could; I truly do.
> you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC
Even if that were true, by whatever undefined metric you're defining as 'better', how does that give you the right to commit hundreds of war crimes and atrocities to change their government?
You might want to read up on recent US history btw - and how we're perceived right now [1]. There are many very good reasons why the world considers the US to be the greatest threat to global peace, stability and democracy [2], [3]; not just since "orange man" but since 2003 [4]. Iran never even come close.
0 - https://truthout.org/articles/us-israeli-attacks-have-damage...
1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/14/america-allies-divi...
2 - https://truthout.org/articles/people-worldwide-name-us-as-a-...
3 - https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/
4 - https://www.democracynow.org/2003/10/31/headlines/poll_israe...
(non affiliated - not an advert) I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.
I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.
This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.
Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence. If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.
And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters. And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").
The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.
What a weird leap to make. Nope, I just searched to find those; with a search engine.
> I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.
I know Ground News; thanks though. I assume you're unaware how patronizing you're coming across, but trust that my media literacy is not the problem here.
Now, if you can point to where anything I said is falsifiable, great and thank you. Otherwise, maybe drop the insinuations and assumptions.
> I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.
You think everything started on October 7th? ... You think there was evidence of mass rape? You have credible evidence of these young people "forced to watch"?
Do you also still believe in the 40 beheaded babies, the baby in the oven, the boobs being cut off?
... And you are out here questioning the media literacy of others? Physician, heal thyself.
> This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.
There is no widely verified reporting that the videos shown to journalists contain:
* Women being paraded through Gaza streets after rape
* Crowds cheering raped victims in public processions
* Families being forced to watch grenade executions of relatives
Yes, there were some videos shared by Hamas of them doing murder and other bad stuff. But that's not what you claimed.
> Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence.
Very few people thought Israel had no right to respond to October 7th by force.
Responding with genocide? No. No they do not have the right to do that.
> If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.
A, Israel uses human shields too. They have done for years; long before October 7th. Not to mention their long history of mass rape, child abuse, torture, false flags, terrorism etc.
B, Even if human shields are used, the attacking force must still distinguish civilians from targets; avoid disproportionate harm; take precautions to minimize civilian deaths.
There's simply no way to claim that's what Israel has done and believe it without some form of lobotomy.
> And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters.
The 30,000 figure is widely disputed, and Israel have openly admitted to having had agents there stirring up that specific trouble.
And if you want to bring up systemic torture, you're going to have to explain why that's ok for the US and Israel - but not Iran. Myself, I'm consistently against torture.
> And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").
Calling it “genocidal intent” in a strict legal sense is debatable and probably overstated. However, killing tens of thousands of children and bombing entire cities into rubble; bombing 500 schools in Iran and basically every school and hospital in Gaza, etc - that's more than genocidal intent. It's genocide. So I'm very confused how you think Iran is somehow worse in this comparison.
> The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.
A 40 year old claim, with absolutely no evidence. Let's try comparing that to Israel's nukes, and their 'Samson option'. Or, try comparing it to the only country ever to actually use nukes during war. Again, I just don't see how Iran comes off worse in this comparison without massive baseline racism and ignorance of history.
... There's a good chance that I'm wasting my time here, but hey - maybe some of this will stick with you. Try sourcing any of it on Ground News, if you like.
Iran is losing a war it started (by attacking Israel with hundreds of missiles, attacking civilian shipping, sponsoring terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who commit regular attrocities).
These wars are "total wars." Total war is the only option left to Israel and its allies, because as long as Hamas and the Ayatollah regime exists (with their written and well-documented aim to "annihilate" Israel and Jews), then Israeli civilians face an existential threat. The last remaining Jewish nation faces an existential threat. This is a direct consequence of the rabid anti-semitism that's inbuilt into Islamist regimes.
You are not happy for Israel to win its total wars.
Were you happy for the allies to win WW2? From my PoV, 70K UK civilians lost their lives, vs 2M German civilians. The civilian death toll was massively one-sided. But it was Germany that started a total war, and I hope you and I can agree that it was Germany (with its genocidal anti-semitism among other appalling characteristics) that deserved to lose the war.
Aside from all your debunked claims, and aside from your ahistorical misunderstandings of very recent history... Trying to justify "total war" against a mostly civilian population - ~50% of whom are children - is so, so far beyond the pale that I truly do not know how to reach you. For that reason, I'm out of this conversation.
Gaza doesn't get a free pass to fire rockets at Israeli towns, invade it, and massacre thousands of its civilians on the basis that Gaza's population is allegedly 50% children.
In your world view, at what point would Israel be entitled to fight back against Gaza? How many Nova Festivals before Israel is allowed to defend itself?
And what is Israel allowed to do, bearing in mind Gaza's government urges its civilians to "bare their chests" to Israel (i.e. act as human shields), and Gaza bases military assets in schools and hospitals (well documented)?
I'm interested to know which of my arguments has been "debunked"?
God forbid a business makes some ethical choices.
I've been running a new solution in beta for a while and am about to go commercial (Germany). In my solution, it's essential to keep personal data safe and ensuring the customer it's not shared with anybody else.
I used Azure and AWS in the past, but stopped. Using only German data centers & services is a selling point for my customers and builds additional trust. Aside the initial effort, I don't see any big technological disadvantages for my use-case and actually pay less now for operating everything.
But since this administration has started to threaten allies and keeps this nonsensical trade balance and tariffs argument (which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services which are never included in the trade balance nonsense) you need to answer in some way.
And with tensions rising staying on US services is becoming a strategic risk.
Given the growing demand to move away from US services and towards European alternatives, I wonder what the US will look like in 10 years if this move gains significant momentum.
They even have a specific Jira-migration tool: https://www.openproject.org/docs/installation-and-operations...
The hard work is integration and data workflows, that is hard work regardless of the chosen “exploitation interface”.
You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.
These people are telling themselves (and others) stories of their own creation, disconnected from any empirical testing of the reality around them. Disturbing to witness, particularly how many people read something like this and without a shred of critical thought say “damn, that sounds good! Sign me up!”
There are a few alternatives, depending what you want.
why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?
I could not find any information on what kind of influence a online-petition on wemove.eu would have...
The comparison to PostgreSQL in particular is very poor in that regard.
Wat? These are wildly different things:
> Say No to PostgreSQL
Sure, if you self-host it, this would be a stupid thing to say.
> Say No to Excel
A little worse: it's proprietary and who knows what it does and where it sends your data.
> Say No to Salesforce
Way worse: they host the data, and who knows what they do with it.
If XYZ Inc. built gotham with palantir supplying them foundry, palantir can claim to be "just like postgres".
This all matters only if you're actually against gotham / automated surveillance, of course, and believe that it was not happening until alex karp.
Salesforce, Microsoft, and PostgresSQL contributors aren't bragging about how their products enable lethal military operations.
Out of technical curiosity,where do we find more on how Palatir is helping technically?.
Types of ML jobs they are running?
Open source or AI models they are using.
"All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign" - https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deport...
"‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid" - https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
"The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2022.2...
"ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data" - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palan...
"How one company – Palantir – is mapping the nation’s data" - https://theconversation.com/when-the-government-can-see-ever...
"AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying" - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
>Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
>“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
Ah yes, European issues
Also, shit done elsewhere will be repeated in all other places, no reason to doubt that.
There are enough far-right (and generally Putin-aligned, like Hungary) forces on the continent that they’d love to feed.
They're definitely operating in Europe. They literally have 15 offices scattered around.
It's accurate. They do separate families. How or why doesn't matter, the fact stands in its own. It's not a "mischaracterization", it's a fact.
But apparently I can't complain because they're both criminals and I can only complain about one! It says in the rulebook!
However
> A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran
So does Google, so does Meta, so does Oracle. What do you think all that Palantir software runs on in the clouds? On Palantir's own huge datacenters? They don'thave those. The huge bulk of it runs on it on clouds provided my Microsoft, Amazon, Google.
Meta in particular causes such ridiculously larger amounts of societal damage that focusing so much energy on Palantir specifically is a dead giveaway it's not really about harm caused, it's about optics. Because they themselves likely use WhatsApp and Instagram, yet they don't knowingly use Palantir products.
If you're going to single out one US tech company as "we need to stop cooperating with them", I don't see how it can be any other than Meta. It's like telling someone morbidly obese to stop eating a single cookie per day rather than the 5 cheese pizzas they're also having. Maybe the cookie is slightly worse per gram, but it's also completely ineffective to focus on.
As someone who strongly supports European digital sovereignty and eliminating dependency on the US, I'm frankly very tired of so damn much of the activist discourse around these issues revolving around US-centred topics. Yes, sure, Gaza is not the US, and the US-Israel war with Iran is bad for Europe, but those are damn well not the reasons we should say no to Palantir.
If the Israel-Gaza conflict hadn't reignited a couple of years ago and thus Gaza wasn't on everybody's minds, and if the Iran attacks hadn't (yet) happened, should we then have nothing to say as to why we don't want Palantir than it's provision of services for internal US immigration policies? Maybe I should be grateful they haven't also listed Palantir being involved in period-tracking of American women in the wake of the reversal of Roe-vs-Wade.
Jesus Christ, won't the most vocal pro-European activists please stop making everything about US talking points, and start being able to take a stance from basic principles and our own interests?
Meta sure causes more damage right now, but banning Palantir, which wouldn't even cause big problems, is an absolute no-brainer
Larry Elisson, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are cut from the exact same cloth. It's beyond doubt.
Meta's products also profited off of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. [0]
The lawsuit won't do anything, the employees at Meta are happy with all of that and Meta does not care.
Anyone would have to be morally bankrupt to work at any of those companies and then knowingly put ex-$COMPANY in their bio as a badge to show they helped contribute to a genocide instead of stopping it.
So as long as Meta paid them, no-one cares.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
Correct, which is why my comment gets downvoted and these posts get mass upvotes and comments: it makes the legions of (ex-)FAANG HNers feel better about themselves.
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2026-01-omnibus-tech-petition-...
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-11-dpc-ireland-petition-E...
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-05-breakupbigtech-petitio...
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-01-elon-musk-dsa-petition...
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2024-12-Amazon-workers-petitio...
- https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2021-11-stop-big-tech-petition...
If USA weren't the one safeguarding (contentious but please read on) the world and its modern interests then we would end up with something much worse.
If you only focus locally, it is quite easy to dismiss any form of killing, any form of surveillance and any form of inconvenience. This is "Defund the Police" meme all over again.
I gain social points by showing my disgust against the killings and murder done by the west. I gain nothing by promoting what they safeguard and promote that is necessary for the world to function. Such dynamics will lead to self ownage at the long run but social status points for oneself in the short term.
Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.
We don't bother doing that because it's a waste of time.
> I gain social points
You gain no social points.
It literally isn't. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
Another commenter posted a link collection of Palantir "safeguarding... the world" here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564423. I feel you accurately described it as being contentious.
It's literally at the very top of the article:
- Stop signing new contracts with Palantir.
- Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
- Invest in transparent, publicly accountable European alternatives.
And Palantir isn't like gunpowder, so I'm not even sure the analogy had any legs to begin with
The era of the Nation State began when courts did have real means to enforce against powerful rogues. The suggestion that simply applying a new weaponized technology overrides the legal context is regressive.