8 comments

  • tombert1 hour ago
    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.
    • Manuel_D25 minutes ago
      Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data. Custody of the data remains with the customer.<p>This is like saying a hospital that uses Excel is handing over data to Microsoft.
      • pvtmert21 minutes ago
        while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...
        • OJFord8 minutes ago
          And 365 (I&#x27;m sure there is an on-premises version, but when not).
        • Manuel_D8 minutes ago
          Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it&#x27;s use.
      • gullies21 minutes ago
        I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.
        • easterncalculus16 minutes ago
          They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.
        • crimsoneer3 minutes ago
          They very much do not, you can import&#x2F;export in pretty much any format you want and they&#x27;ve got a well documented sdk.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;foundry&#x2F;ontology-sdk&#x2F;python-osdk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;foundry&#x2F;ontology-sdk&#x2F;python-os...</a>
        • vovavili16 minutes ago
          Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.
      • foxes5 minutes ago
        Do you work for palantir?
        • Manuel_D0 minutes ago
          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&#x27;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 space lasers.
      • guywithahat15 minutes ago
        In some regards I&#x27;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&#x27;t imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.<p>That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they&#x27;d pull out. Frankly I&#x27;m surprised they did much work with hospitals at all
        • nradov10 minutes ago
          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.
  • willis93644 minutes ago
    Why are so many entities dealing with Palantir? They are a poison pill for customers.
    • 0x3f33 minutes ago
      They don&#x27;t have in-house talent to implement what they want. The same reasons they used to hire Deloitte&#x2F;EY&#x2F;KPMG&#x2F;PwC. Palantir is one rung up from those places when it comes to talent&#x2F;ability to deliver.
      • senkora8 minutes ago
        +1. Think of it like a consulting shop that can deliver customized software instead of just slide decks and excel workbooks.
    • paxys18 minutes ago
      Palantir is a glorified IT consulting company. You tell them &quot;I want a system to manage patient records&quot; 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 &amp; military contracts because of lobbying and influence, but generally everything you see about them online is marketing.
      • OJFord3 minutes ago
        Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting company...
    • nradov8 minutes ago
      Which customers? Outside of the HN bubble, very few consumers know or care which entities are using Palantir.
  • payphonefiend28 minutes ago
    Their main product is just consulting and PowerBI but for government. So much hysteria online!
    • danny_codes11 minutes ago
      Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy
      • newfriend2 minutes ago
        Wants to tear down democracy = &quot;doesn&#x27;t support my chosen political party&quot;
    • llm_nerd6 minutes ago
      Hysteria? Have you listened to Karp? Palantir pushes some pretty shit-tier BI noise to clueless executives (it&#x27;s actually uproarious the mythology that has built around that company), and this weird creep talks like they&#x27;re the masters of the universe.<p>Thiel is another incredibly bizarre creep, and he sits as the chairman of the board. Both are <i>very</i> tightly associated with the Trump crime syndicate and the US government, which increasingly is the world&#x27;s #1 threat, and should be treated as equally dangerous.
  • nottorp15 minutes ago
    Palantir is an AI firm now? Thought it was a data collection&#x2F;spyware firm.
    • easterncalculus9 minutes ago
      <p><pre><code> spyware </code></pre> Why is Palantir a spyware company, but Snowflake or Databricks are not? &quot;Spyware&quot; has an actual definition, and there are real companies that sell it, like Pegasus. It&#x27;s not some catch-all term for what people call &quot;evil&quot;.
      • natebc3 minutes ago
        If they&#x27;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&#x27;m glad NYC hospitals have dropped them and I hope many, many more companies and organizations choose the same path.
  • user393938230 minutes ago
    NYC schools just passed some AI guidelines as well. No training on student PII data, no final grades, etc. Unfortunately that&#x27;s a pinprick for the behemoth.
  • infinitewars24 minutes ago
    J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel&#x27;s Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.<p>A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.
    • paxys15 minutes ago
      I&#x27;d be concerned if any of the parties involved were halfway competent. This is a grift for taxpayer dollars, nothing more.
  • whiterose12141 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • quentindanjou1 hour ago
      [self redacted as the above comment was obviously a troll]
      • dmix1 hour ago
        &gt; Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics<p>They 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.<p>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 and military intelligence collection.
        • varispeed40 minutes ago
          Main product is sales tactics.
        • varispeed40 minutes ago
          Main product is good PR.
      • ianm2181 hour ago
        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.
        • 0x3f53 minutes ago
          It&#x27;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.
      • 0x3f54 minutes ago
        &gt; ah? 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.<p>It&#x27;s on prem at the customer.
      • mhh__1 hour ago
        I know nothing about palantir in particular but typically these software stacks have a bunch of random crap in them to deal with fetching data from other system&#x27;s the customer has.
    • throwaway274481 hour ago
      The law is generally a bad proxy for whether or not society approves of xyz commercial behavior
    • tombert1 hour ago
      I don&#x27;t think people are accusing Palantir of <i>criminally</i> 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&#x27;s &quot;illegal&quot; doesn&#x27;t change the fact that what they&#x27;re doing is creepy Big Brother shit.<p>Also bullshit that they don&#x27;t store data.
    • bilbo0s1 hour ago
      &gt;<i>Like it or not, there really isn&#x27;t any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work Palantir</i><p>That’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.
      • fakedang1 hour ago
        Europe is currently lagging on the cloud front, the AI front and even the SaaS front. They can&#x27;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.
        • 0x3f51 minutes ago
          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&#x27;s worth in the end.
          • fakedang22 minutes ago
            Trust me, they can&#x27;t even do that.
        • holoduke1 hour ago
          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
  • varispeed37 minutes ago
    &quot;controversial&quot;<p>Everyone knows what&#x27;s going on, but also everyone is too afraid to stand up for some reason.