this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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They’re a data analytics platform: https://www.palantir.com/docs They got in close with the intelligence agencies early on and have some big money with connections behind them.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing. A government that does have your data could use their analytics tools to do some highly dodgy stuff, though, which is why they’re popular with governments and feared by everyone else.
That's what they claim, and yet people were able to hack their Discord age verification tech and discover otherwise. Where have you even heard this, because I hope it's not from ~~their CEO~~ anyone on their board, ~~He~~ Peter Thiel often goes on religiously fueled technofeudalist rants about the antichrist, the end of the world, and the justification for unified warrant-less mass surveillance of it all.
Oh, and: https://lemmy.world/post/44485368
While everyone is busy hating on Musk and the like, many forget that utter evil pieces of shit like Peter Thiel exist. Palantir is just the tip of the iceberg, he's been manipulating the entire digital ecosphere for nearly two decades now, with a well placed venture capitalist firm, grants for the "right" software and teams, while suffocating others....
Small correction: Karp and Thiel are cofounders, Karp is the CEO and Thiel is on the board. And while Karp is just as bad, it's Thiel who does the Antichrist speech tours.
Other commenters have addressed the Discord question - it sounds like that was a completely separate company and technology (just the same investors).
And no, I didn’t get any info from Thiel or Karp, and yes, they are awful people.
Ah, yes, that completely separate company where one of the biggest investors is from a fund belonging to Peter Thiel. Completely separate.
The "not having your data" part is pretty interesting. From what I've read, they build software that links data from various sources, and specifically promises not to send it back to HQ.
I think what they do is host an instance/shard of their tools for each customer, probably on a public cloud provider like AWS. Palantir manage the software, the customer provides the data.
Palantir’s engineers absolutely could have access to any data in their tools if they wanted it enough (they write the software, after all), but I would assume that there are various safeguards in place - the CIA absolutely wouldn’t want Palantir staff accessing their data, but on the flipside the CIA might be very keen for Palantir staff to help them access data owned by another country’s intelligence agencies…