Discussion
New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK
whiterose1214: Meaningless decision. Whatever your views on PLTR's government collaboration it a) does not store any data b) has never been credibly accused of criminally misusing the data it gets from its partners c) is a completely different department than their commercial efforts. Like it or not, there really isn't any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work Palantir does, but it's low-hanging fruit for people who don't understand what they do looking to show their political chops.
bilbo0s: >Like it or not, there really isn't any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work PalantirThat’s only making European entrepreneurs salivate at all of that sweet EU funding they can suck up to replicate PLTR in service of their sovereignty initiatives.
quentindanjou: > a) does not store any dataah? Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics (from the above article contract). The base necessity for doing this work is... data, and the data is somewhere, stored.> b) has never been credibly accused of criminally misusing the data it gets from its partnersThat's not the issue explained in the article. Not sure why you are sliding the discussion on that.
ianm218: I think he is implying that their enterprise contracts are all on prem and airgapped? Seems unlikely to me they do that for all their customers but they likely do for the government ones anyway.
tombert: I don't think people are accusing Palantir of criminally misusing the data. The government rewrites the laws around what these analytics firms are capable of, and as such Palantir operates in that space. Whether or not it's "illegal" doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is creepy Big Brother shit.Also bullshit that they don't store data.
tombert: It seems like letting a company like Palantir anywhere near private medical data is a pretty bad idea. I am happy NYC is doing this.
fakedang: Europe is currently lagging on the cloud front, the AI front and even the SaaS front. They can't even wean themselves off of MS Office ffs, after all the shenanigans Microsoft and the US have pulled against them. I have no hopes of the EU building anything that can replicate even 25% of Palantir.
throwaway27448: The law is generally a bad proxy for whether or not society approves of xyz commercial behavior
dmix: > Then explain how they do surveillance and analyticsThey work with law enforcement agencies and help them process data they legally collect into other government databases. Their main product is merging data from various databases and adding a UI layer for analysis.Basically, Palantir is a data integration company that works for government and larges businesses under contract. Some data they get hired to work on includes surveillance data.
holoduke: And not forget hardware. All they have is meaningless leaders with zero vision. My dumb AI claw tool has better view of the world than they do. They might as well be replaced by those AI agents. Probably better outcome that current
0x3f: They only have to replicate Palantir marketing and garnish it with a bit of nationalism. Not like the government is good at getting its money's worth in the end.
0x3f: It's not necessarily airgapped but yes. Air gapping is a bit much for hospital data, which after all does have to be readily accessible to the people working at the hospital or group of hospitals.
willis936: Why are so many entities dealing with Palantir? They are a poison pill for customers.
Manuel_D: Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data. Custody of the data remains with the customer.This is like saying a hospital that uses Excel is handing over data to Microsoft.
pvtmert: while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...
gullies: I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.
infinitewars: J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel's Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.
nottorp: Palantir is an AI firm now? Thought it was a data collection/spyware firm.
easterncalculus: spyware Why is Palantir a spyware company, but Snowflake or Databricks are not? "Spyware" has an actual definition, and there are real companies that sell it, like Pegasus. It's not some catch-all term for what people call "evil".
guywithahat: In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all
nradov: Most Epic products aggressively isolate data. The majority of instances are run on-premises, and even those hosted on cloud platforms are single-tenant. They have a good record for data security and privacy; afaik all Epic data breaches were actually caused by infiltration of other customer systems.
payphonefiend: Their main product is just consulting and PowerBI but for government. So much hysteria online!
danny_codes: Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy
foxes: Do you work for palantir?
Manuel_D: No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate. I can get being politically opposed to the conservative politics of some of its founders, but the vast majority of conservative-founded companies don't get nearly as much criticism. A lot of it is seriously borderline Q-anon levels of conspiratorial talk. Just look at the comment in this thread that Peter Thiel is going to assassinate people with orbital weapons.
newfriend: Wants to tear down democracy = "doesn't support my chosen political party"
crimsoneer: They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk.https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-os...
paxys: Palantir is a glorified IT consulting company. You tell them "I want a system to manage patient records" and they will dispatch a team of engineers fresh out of college to build it for you while charging top dollar. They are able to get government & military contracts because of lobbying and influence, but generally everything you see about them online is marketing.
OJFord: Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting company...
natebc: If they're not a spyware company then they really super duper picked the wrong name. Maybe they were just going for evil, in which case ... well I'm glad NYC hospitals have dropped them and I hope many, many more companies and organizations choose the same path.
cat-turner: Palantir can install a data backdoor at anytime with their software. If you haven't noticed that businesses are openly violating data privacy you aren't paying attention. I don't have trust in our judicial system if Trump pardons criminals everyday.
Manuel_D: Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it's use.
auxiliarymoose: How do I decline it?? I keep clicking no, hide, not interested, cancel, etc. but it keeps showing up and activating...if I had a nickel for every time I clicked it on accident in Azure because a layout shift moved it under my mouse when trying to press a button I would have a lot of nickels. It even showed up as an app on my phone because I guess the Office 365 entry got hijacked...
mc32: Your Entra Admin like your Google workspace admin can publish or remove features from user availability.
