Discussion

Say No to Palantir in Europe

0x3f: > A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran.Ah yes, European issues

linhns: Europe can regulate anything out. Palantir should be no different.

gzread: Petitions accomplish nothing. Money talks, talking doesn't.

SilverElfin: They can be the precursor to other forms of action. It helps the activists find each other to get started, even if the pressure it generates isn’t enough to convince politicians.

bicx: No to Palantir in Europe

lucasay: Petitions don’t do much on their own, but they’re often how pressure starts. And ‘not European issues’ feels off when these companies operate globally anyway.

__natty__: I wonder what the alternative for Europe might be? A new project to launch, or is there an existing solution? Siren? Argon? In any case, it could be a great opportunity for Europe to create new jobs whilst increasing its sovereignty.

wolvoleo: Even if it's nothing that would be a big win.

Xelbair: Why?why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?

LightBug1: They help raise awareness but, true, only work in conjunction with other actions.Fortunately, I am aware of some of those other actions. E.g. pro bono legals taking the fight on, etc.

chopete3: >> Palantir enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran.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.

layer8: So you used voice dictation?

victorbjorklund: Public opinion can def have effect if you live in a democracy. Politicians rather pay more for something else if they think it will help them / avoid hurt them. Might not work in America though.

inaros: "Palantir’s Architecture: Analyzing the Ethics of Surveillance AI" - https://erikabarker.ai/data-analysis/the-palantir-paradox-de..."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...

tinco: No we can't. In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed. Europe is not a federation like the US, worse many of the countries in Europe themselves are governed much like federations. We are easy prey for big American corporations. It's easy for Palantir to sell their product and then a thousand little government organizations will claim there simply is no alternative at the same quality level.

mrlonglong: The UK has decided to terminate Palantir contracts when they become due for renewal. Not before time.

masfuerte: Do you have a reference for this? There's been a lot of talk from ministers about reviewing contracts when break clauses allow, but I haven't seen anything definitive and this still seems to be a matter for individual departments.

deaux: Sure, Europe should absolutely be saying no to Palantir.However> A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with IranSo 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.

Mordisquitos: Indeed. It is very disappointing that they chose that as the opening paragraph of their "Why" section, without even making the attempt to relate those points as to why Palantir in Europe would be bad for European citizens.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?

scorpionfeet: One at a time. Just because you can’t stop all crime doesn’t mean you don’t try to stop any crime. What is it with HN bros and their love of fallicies?

g-b-r: The owners of the other companies are at least not as openly opposed to democracy, though.Meta sure causes more damage right now, but banning Palantir, which wouldn't even cause big problems, is an absolute no-brainer

epolanski: Instantly signed up.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.

FpUser: >"Public opinion can def have effect if you live in a democracy."Having ability to choose between 2 sides of the same ass does not look like much of democracy. Never mind the money the candidate has to have and where this money comes from. And what happens to this democracy when the bills come due and the interest on government borrowing "on behalf" can no longer be paid.

lpcvoid: And I am very happy about that superpower. Regulation is a very good thing, specially when wielded against US big tech.

hkt: Not before handing over an enormous cache of NHS patient data to them during the pandemic. If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.

mrlonglong: Yes whoever decided to let them do this has a lot of explaining to do. This data should never have left the UK.

gradus_ad: Say No to Subsidizing European Defense

MrScruff: Calling everyone you disagree with a 'bro' doesn't make your point any more convincing.

scorpionfeet: Chill bro it’s just a joke. Sensitive.

delichon: Isn't this a bit like foregoing the use of gunpowder because it isn't chivalrous? If your enemies don't agree it doesn't end well.

SlightlyLeftPad: Good news, Atlassian is technically an Australian company.

mrlonglong: I've had a look and this probably is where their thinking is at.https://www.ft.com/content/2d2b1af1-edea-4fd0-a081-3811e34bc...

lokimedes: [delayed]

pavlov: Awareness can ultimately change things.Suffragettes were ridiculed for collecting petitions in support of women’s right to vote. Who cares about papers filled with women’s signatures? How could that change something as fundamental as who gets to vote in a democracy?The power of Big Tech money in today’s Western democracies is a similar tenet that’s just taken for granted. How could it ever change? Until it does, and then it looks obvious it had to.

chuckadams: Suffragettes had to go out and talk to people to get them to sign their names. Online petitions are worth as much as the the paper they're written on.

tossandthrow: Now, the EU can, using the anti coercion instrument.

dfxm12: Can you explain the comparison because on its face and especially given the context in the link, I don't see the connection.

rvz: > 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.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 a Meta paid them, no-one cares.[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...

beerws: I of course do not know your specific usage and requirements, but Berlin-based OpenProject might be a suitable and mature Jira-alternative for you - in addition to being outside US jurisdiction their services are available both on-prem/self-hosted and cloud-based.They even have a specific Jira-migration tool: https://www.openproject.org/docs/installation-and-operations...

badlibrarian: No, because gunpowder has no loyalty, no terms of service, no American CEO who can be forced to testify before Congress and say interesting things about European defense customers or provide lists of who has a tattoo or not.

kakacik: 5-eyes, a bit tricky... but yeah anything that isnt a direct data pipeline to US gov and 3-letter agencies is a massive longterm win, in security and economy

nerfbatplz: Palantir is part of the IDF's kill chain. In Gaza that means supporting the automated targeting systems that choose targets with little to no human oversight, and then the automated tracking systems that follow targets until they are at home with their families so that the entire family can be killed at once.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.”

airstrike: Not at all. It's against using Palantir specifically, not against the idea of something like Palantir "but European".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

raincole: Half of the comments in this thread are expressing how they're very against the idea of something like Palantir "but European".

niekiepriekie: But it’s already widespread in Europe, or at least in the Netherlands. Amsterdam Airport uses it, as do the Dutch police and the Dutch army. So shouldn’t it be: kick out Palantir?

thomasgeelens: Oh man I'm in NL, didn't know that, that's. .. dark.

karl11: I don't think there has ever been a company so poorly understood (willfully or otherwise) as Palantir. They make a software platform, it does not come with any data, does not come connected to any datasources, etc. You can literally sign up right now for a trial and see this for yourself. It looks the same if you were to purchase a license. This headline might as well say 'Say No to PostgreSQL' or 'Say No to Excel' or 'Say No to Salesforce', etc. Wild.

tankenmate: Jira is Australian.

KellyCriterion: Ex-Colleagues are launching a startup right now: No US-Services from the beginning on, only OpenSource and this new EU-Office thingy.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.

polyamid23: What new EU-Office thingy?

grsmvg: Reading this interview and the comments doesn't really spark a lot of confidence in the product (in Dutch): https://tweakers.net/reviews/14562/nextcloud-met-een-strik-e...I paints the picture of it being mostly a hyped marketing wrapper around Nextcloud that hasn't even launched yet.

porridgeraisin: I think when the public goes against palantir, they are specifically against gotham - their govt/intelligence-only product. It is true that gotham is an app built on top of foundry just like your business builds on top of foundry. But in this case since palantir is the one building it (and heavily marketing it may I say) they get the bad rep for it.If XYZ Inc. built gotham with palantir as supplier, palantir can claim to be "just like postgres".This is all if you're actually against gotham / automated surveillance, of course.

kylecazar: Citing shit Palantir does in other countries is a fine justification for not deploying it in your own.

0x3f: Perhaps, but one would think those aren't the prime issues meriting first mention. I went in hoping for details of what Palantir is doing wrong _in Europe_, but all I got was some rallying the base cliches.

kakacik: We prefer seeing all humans as equal, and not setting their value based on their passports like US does.Also, shit done elsewhere will be repeated in all other places, no reason to doubt that.

encom: Also "ICE separate[s] families" is such a ridiculous mischaracterization it makes me question all their other arguments.

tasuki: > This headline might as well say 'Say No to PostgreSQL' or 'Say No to Excel' or 'Say No to Salesforce', etc. Wild.Wat? These are wildly different things:> Say No to PostgreSQLSure, if you self-host it, this would be a stupid thing to say.> Say No to ExcelA little worse: it's proprietary and who knows what it does and where it sends your data.> Say No to SalesforceWay worse: they host the data, and who knows what they do with it.

gip: Surprised by this take. Building a startup is already insanely hard. So I wouldn’t like to add more challenge by spending time integrating with non-US services if they are not top just because of my political views.I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.

pimeys: https://office.eu/

chme: I'm just wondering why this isn't a European Citizen Initiative (ECI)...I could not find any information on what kind of influence a online-petition on wemove.eu would have...