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Comment by MaxScheiber | Hacker News Reader

They make software for non-technical users to explore relationships in unstructured data, and they do a lot of in-house consulting with their clients in terms of migrating data and building custom software add-ons. It's really not anywhere near as sinister as people make it out to be.

Contrary to the WSJ article, I don't think Palantir does any data mining. Instead, Palantir's core competence is taking a customer's existing data and appropriately modeling it in their software.

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"A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the US government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point [...]"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#2013

I wouldn't call these fellas "non-technical users" myself.

Plenty of CIA analysts are non-technical, for starters, and I would imagine the same holds for the other agencies you mentioned. One does not need to be a programmer or especially well-versed in technology to hold those jobs. I think we're splitting hairs on the definition of "non-technical," but we can both agree that parsing large amounts of data isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, especially without formal training. Palantir's software does help with the data exploration process, as their website examples and demos should show.

I've done money laundering and fraud investigations for financial firms. Never got to use Palantir, but I know a guy who did. He said it's basically for people who don't know how to query or code on any level. I'm not surprised either. I can count the people in my field who want to learn SAS / SQL / R / VBA / Whatever on one hand.

Every big company that sells enterprise software has those same clients. Those are Oracle clients, IBM clients, Microsoft clients, and Cisco clients. Why is Palantir special for having a GSA price list?

You don't do consulting and not understand what your client is doing with the data they have. Palantir doesn't need to do any data mining of their own. Making a model of unethical data is still unethical.*

*I don't know if Palatir is an unethical company or not, just responding to the accusations.

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Microsoft and Dell aren't touching the data and building PCs hand-in-hand with the company to ensure the computer run exactly as the company needs them to. Microsoft and Dell don't need to know what anyone is doing with their PCs. Palatir needs to know what people are doing with their software so they can structure models around that exact set of data.

Was IBM blamed to sell machines to Nazi Germany for helping singling out jews?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

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