From what I understand : Palantir is doing everything what Facebook does but the end game is not the same. Facebook want to sell your metadata to publicist to sell you a dream that you will buy. Palantir, however, is doing this and selling it to fascist governments and buying lobbyists to push fascist legislation
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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They had CIA funding before, and they helped Israel plan their attacks in the Gaza zone, so they actively partake in stripping data from any source to help governments be horrible
Bold of you to assume that Facebook is not selling your data to Palantir to be recombined and re-sold...
What they mean is that Facebook is on the supply side of data and Palantir is on the demand side.
Tons of companies are selling all of your data, Palantir is buying all of the data and selling integrated surveillance of your activities to anyone who can operate a wire transfer.
It’s effectively bold
Do you think Pal knew Peter Thiel was ~~playing for the same team~~ gay before the public did?
I dont understand your question. Thiel build palantir with people from google and OpenAI, they clearly know what they’re doing. Maybe they lied themselves in thinking they’re selling security but they’re not really auto reflexive
I mean did Palantir gather that Thiel was gay before the public knew. Its quite the smackaroonie
Probably, he found the thing why would he hide it ?
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.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing.
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…
Their moat is a total lack of ethics
And you think Meta and Google have ethics?
No but their business is selling ads basically, not getting people emprisoned.
imprisoned
tx, not my native language so I appreciate being corrected.
Meta and Google have no ethics but that's a side effect of a lack of regulations and being a publicly traded company. With Palantir the lack of ethics are not a side effect, it's a feature.
We used one of their products, Foundry, where I work. It is really more of a suite of products that all center on making it easy to connect and interact with data. Before I understood what they were and who was behind them, I was a huge fan. They are objectively impressive tools.
For example, there is a tool that helps you visually understand the lineage of data, essentially showing the different joins behind a given data table.
There was another tool that was pretty amazing at making it easy to interact with, and clean/prep, huge datasets. It very quickly became my preferred method of browsing a new dataset. I could see every column in it, all the metadata of the column, obviously it's format, but also based on that format, some quick visual insights. For example, a data field that was all dates would quickly show a distribution of the min and max dates and bars representing the number of records in each year. It was just really easy to determine whether the dataset I was looking at would have what I needed, at the granularity or frequency of refresh I would need it. I think my favorite thing is that you could write rules to transform, combine, obfuscate, divide, etc, etc, various columns of a dataset, or even add new columns based on some math of existing columns. Then you could have that output into a new copy of that dataset. I called these cleaners. Then, if the parent dataset happened to be a live one, any updates to the parent dataset would run through the cleaner and into the new dataset, at whatever cadence the parent is being updated. And that relationship chain would be illustrated and represented on that visual lineage tool automatically.
I'm sure a skilled coder or SQL master could accomplish a lot of this, but I am a total generalist and have googled 100% of the SQL I've ever run. The visual approach to handling data is just really intuitive and easy to pick up, so it made it really easy for me to wield data I might otherwise not have been able to in the course of my work.
There's more but I'm starting to feel dirty because I feel like I'm gushing over this monstrosity. None of that simplicity is worth all of This.
Nah that's great info, although very unfortunate to think of the implications of Palantir being competent.
Makes me wonder if the big market for data science didn't signify the end of decent life on Earth.
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