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?
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.
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.
If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
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.
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.
Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?
Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.
There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.
When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?
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
I don't think it is. I liked a simpler world we lived without having to worry or look where a company was from.
But since this administration has started to threaten allies and keeps this nonsensical trade balance and tariffs argument (which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services which are never included in the trade balance nonsense) you need to answer in some way.
And with tensions rising staying on US services is becoming a strategic risk.
> which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services
Given the growing demand to move away from US services and towards European alternatives, I wonder what the US will look like in 10 years if this move gains significant momentum.
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.
Even Alex Karp openly recommends European countries to roll their own alternatives. If anyone in Europe insists on Palantir it’s by their own volition.
The hard work is integration and data workflows, that is hard work regardless of the chosen “exploitation interface”.
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.
> In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed
You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.
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.
Palantir's technology, as its own name suggests, is inherently dangerous, regardless of who controls it. The right alternative is to simply not build capabilities similar to Palantir in the EU - ideally, to legally forbid building them at all. This type of aggregated data flow simply gives too much control to whoever has access to it, and thus greatly harms democracy.
You live in a world with adversaries. If you don't build and use tech like Palantir, the adversaries will come for you and destroy you. Its easy to show one's morals here but whats harder is to accept the dirty work to ensure society functions.
That's a false choice. By investing in weapons instead of diplomacy, we've created this world of tit-for-tat violence. We can dismantle it too, it's not necessary to continue escalating until we exterminate our species.
Maybe we should leverage all of this supposedly world-changing AI to move on from primitive wars instead of using it to build more weapons. At a certain point, our species will be faced with a choice between maintaining the status quo (climate destruction, mass casualties through violent conflicts, food/water shortages, extinction-level events, etc) or working together to forge a sustainable path forward for the benefit of the species. An argument that this current world order is just how things are and there's nothing to be done but escalate is just a vote for the former.
I definitely don't think that the current world order is just how things are. That does not mean you should act now in terms of how the world order _would be in the future_.
No that's not true, some try to do it by the book ( ai act, gdpr, and follow German law etc) but they won't have any chance on the market, because those who ignore any law will provide more information / control etc for police, state etc etc
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.
Pressure is building, thankfully. It's not just petitions now, but legal groups getting involved, etc. At least in the UK. Hopefully it spreads like wildfire around Europe. The orange Oompa Loompa is likely helping kindle those flames nicely.
How do we differentiate between genuine empathy and love for the world and simple virtue signalling?
If USA weren't the one safeguarding (contentious but please read on) the world and its modern interests then we would end up with something much worse.
If you only focus locally, it is quite easy to dismiss any form of killing, any form of surveillance and any form of inconvenience. This is "Defund the Police" meme all over again.
I gain social points by showing my disgust against the killings and murder done by the west. I gain nothing by promoting what they safeguard and promote that is necessary for the world to function. Such dynamics will lead to self ownage at the long run but social status points for oneself in the short term.
Most of humanity has lived without police for most of its existence. It's not an inherent part of life. And in many places, the police is a very recent (few centuries old) invention with ties to oppressive structures such as slavery and colonialism.
Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.
I agree that in both cases there is an issue that needs to be solved (see NYPD budget as example) so don’t take “defund” at face value but more like “radical changes are needed”
if you want to tear something apart to rebuild peacefully this is the way. their salaries are paid by public money so defund, get everyone out and rebuild. not unlike dept of education which may also need a similar treatment to rebuild
Oh boy, I'm looking forward to the brand new EU program to allocate one million dollars to eligible startups that can develop a weapons and targeting platform so long as all forms are filed well and a registered notary has read out the bill to all participants and each participant has read out the application so that informed consent is received.
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.
Because some people are natural followers and won’t do anything unless there is a nice safe herd doing it. In this case we actually need a herd to push back against authoritarianism. And if people don’t feel empowered until they feel safe then enough protestors must stand up to create that critical mass. It’s a painful irony: people won’t mobilize because no one has mobilized. What makes it worse is the mocking of the protestors for having the courage to go first.
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.
>"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.
Nope. Government borrows money from investors. including big ones. at some points the investors might come back with a different proposal. peasants can potentially do something about it as well.
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.
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.
>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.”
I love how Palantir is comically evil. Their logo being the Palantir from LoTR (duh) and all. It's wild to me lol. They don't even try to pretend anymore.
It's a European issue because we look to the US and now appreciate more than ever the need to introduce barriers to stop temporary fascist governments doing the same permanent damage they have done in the US. Our democratic systems are just as vulnerable to populist leaders taking power. One of those barriers we must erect is the elimination of corporation with unfettered access to institutional data that can be used by fascist governments to maintain or grow their power base.
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.
Believe it or not, it's possible for more than one person or entity to do something. I know, it's really incredible to think about! John and Bill can both scam Elizabeth, even though they live in different countries!
But apparently I can't complain because they're both criminals and I can only complain about one! It says in the rulebook!
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 Iran
So 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.
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?
I suspect that if Palantir had the same exact business model but the CEO had supported Kamala Harris, this campaign would not exist. Or if Palantir had said it supported targeting "fascists" the same people denouncing it would be supporters. So if you're actually serious about sovereignty it probably needs a whole campaign around that cause.
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?
> 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.
or say yes? decel mentality like this is why europe is falling behind. some poor startup will try to backfill these contracts to be the new palantir of europe only to be cut at the knees by regulation and more outcry think piece boycotts like this. rinse and repeat until the us and china become the only relevant acceleration hubs on earth during the singularity
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.
Half of the comments in this thread are expressing how they're very against the idea of something like Palantir "but European". It seems like some Europeans really believe that handicapping themselves is a good idea.
perhaps, but civil law is a negotiated contract including rights of all involved. If a tech conglomerate invents new applications, are they now exempt from civil law?
The era of the Nation State began when courts did have real means to enforce against powerful rogues. The suggestion that simply applying a new weaponized technology overrides the legal context is regressive.
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.
I think when people go 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 any business builds on top of foundry. But in this case since palantir itself 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 supplying them foundry, palantir can claim to be "just like postgres".
This all matters only if you're actually against gotham / automated surveillance, of course, and believe that it was not happening until alex karp.
Ok but then why? Or, what's your point here? Like what would explain the behavior you are noting if it really is that absurd and seemingly arbitrary? Is the implication that they just have really bad PR?
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?
Literally the second bullet point:
> Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
Oh man I'm in NL, didn't know that, that's. .. dark.
"Dutch police also use controversial AI intelligence software by American Palantir" - https://nltimes.nl/2025/08/22/dutch-police-also-use-controve...
"Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe" - https://www.euractiv.com/news/palantir-is-well-on-its-way-to...
Amsterdam Airport? Source?
Well, i don’t have a source. Its very hush hush, as even the part that the police is using it has been leaked by a redacted document. It’s crazy.
https://www.privacynieuws.nl/binnenlands-nieuws/politie-en-j...
say no to palantir in america too
they're giving startups an awful name in the eyes of the people, supposedly by the guy teaching others how to do startups, good grief
Why though? Palantir does good work.
The UK has decided to terminate Palantir contracts when they become due for renewal. Not before time.
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.
I've had a look and this probably is where their thinking is at.
https://www.ft.com/content/2d2b1af1-edea-4fd0-a081-3811e34bc...
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.
Yes whoever decided to let them do this has a lot of explaining to do. This data should never have left the UK.
Grab them by the balls and make sure they are never able to make a political decision with such an impact again.
If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
You said it better than I could have.
"if memory serves" is an interesting way to phrase "I'm just making shit up"
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.
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.
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.
The eu can not move and function in any capacity standalone. The moment the is dropped out the eu tried to fill that hole with the other allies atoll.
So now you know how much it matter :)
I love seeing companies set meritocracy aside for partisan political posturing.
All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.
> sub-optimally
Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?
Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.
There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.
When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?
What new EU-Office thingy?
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.
https://office.eu/
Good news, Atlassian is technically an Australian company.
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
they host theirs services/data in Tasmania?
I don't think it is. I liked a simpler world we lived without having to worry or look where a company was from.
But since this administration has started to threaten allies and keeps this nonsensical trade balance and tariffs argument (which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services which are never included in the trade balance nonsense) you need to answer in some way.
And with tensions rising staying on US services is becoming a strategic risk.
> which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services
Given the growing demand to move away from US services and towards European alternatives, I wonder what the US will look like in 10 years if this move gains significant momentum.
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...
Jira is Australian.
Even Alex Karp openly recommends European countries to roll their own alternatives. If anyone in Europe insists on Palantir it’s by their own volition.
The hard work is integration and data workflows, that is hard work regardless of the chosen “exploitation interface”.
Europe can regulate anything out. Palantir should be no different.
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.
> In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed
You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.
Now, the EU can, using the anti coercion instrument.
And I am very happy about that superpower. Regulation is a very good thing, specially when wielded against US big tech.
'Say "Yes" to Palantir not coming to Europe' - would have been the wording if the vote were organized by Romanian politicians. (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Romanian_presidential_imp...)
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.
Palantir's technology, as its own name suggests, is inherently dangerous, regardless of who controls it. The right alternative is to simply not build capabilities similar to Palantir in the EU - ideally, to legally forbid building them at all. This type of aggregated data flow simply gives too much control to whoever has access to it, and thus greatly harms democracy.
You live in a world with adversaries. If you don't build and use tech like Palantir, the adversaries will come for you and destroy you. Its easy to show one's morals here but whats harder is to accept the dirty work to ensure society functions.
That's a false choice. By investing in weapons instead of diplomacy, we've created this world of tit-for-tat violence. We can dismantle it too, it's not necessary to continue escalating until we exterminate our species.
"We've" wdym? You don't get to decide the rules. Your adversary is not signing a legally binding contract.
"We" as a species with common interests like "not eradicating ourselves through violence."
You are not aware of the interests of your enemies.
I agree with you, but your adversary may not think in a sufficiently developed way.
Which is why we had such destructive wars in the past..
Maybe we should leverage all of this supposedly world-changing AI to move on from primitive wars instead of using it to build more weapons. At a certain point, our species will be faced with a choice between maintaining the status quo (climate destruction, mass casualties through violent conflicts, food/water shortages, extinction-level events, etc) or working together to forge a sustainable path forward for the benefit of the species. An argument that this current world order is just how things are and there's nothing to be done but escalate is just a vote for the former.
I definitely don't think that the current world order is just how things are. That does not mean you should act now in terms of how the world order _would be in the future_.
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?
Even if it's nothing that would be a big win.
d.AP, itemis, datawalk, helsing.
There are a few alternatives, depending what you want.
Did Helsing get its name from the fictional vampire hunter family?
All of them are just as bad a Palantir.
No that's not true, some try to do it by the book ( ai act, gdpr, and follow German law etc) but they won't have any chance on the market, because those who ignore any law will provide more information / control etc for police, state etc etc
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.
Pressure is building, thankfully. It's not just petitions now, but legal groups getting involved, etc. At least in the UK. Hopefully it spreads like wildfire around Europe. The orange Oompa Loompa is likely helping kindle those flames nicely.
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...
How do we differentiate between genuine empathy and love for the world and simple virtue signalling?
If USA weren't the one safeguarding (contentious but please read on) the world and its modern interests then we would end up with something much worse.
If you only focus locally, it is quite easy to dismiss any form of killing, any form of surveillance and any form of inconvenience. This is "Defund the Police" meme all over again.
I gain social points by showing my disgust against the killings and murder done by the west. I gain nothing by promoting what they safeguard and promote that is necessary for the world to function. Such dynamics will lead to self ownage at the long run but social status points for oneself in the short term.
> we would end up with something much worse.
Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
When I saw "defund the policy" I recognised it as virtue signalling.
Most of humanity has lived without police for most of its existence. It's not an inherent part of life. And in many places, the police is a very recent (few centuries old) invention with ties to oppressive structures such as slavery and colonialism.
Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.
Same people that scoff at “Defund the Police” rejoice “Defund the Dept of Education” (and vice versa)
Question: do you agree police must be defunded?
I agree that in both cases there is an issue that needs to be solved (see NYPD budget as example) so don’t take “defund” at face value but more like “radical changes are needed”
The scoffing of "defund the policy" was specifically at the face value interpretation.
if you want to tear something apart to rebuild peacefully this is the way. their salaries are paid by public money so defund, get everyone out and rebuild. not unlike dept of education which may also need a similar treatment to rebuild
> How do we differentiate between genuine empathy and love for the world and simple virtue signalling?
We don't bother doing that because it's a waste of time.
> I gain social points
You gain no social points.
>We don't bother doing that because it's a waste of time.
It literally isn't. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
Oh boy, I'm looking forward to the brand new EU program to allocate one million dollars to eligible startups that can develop a weapons and targeting platform so long as all forms are filed well and a registered notary has read out the bill to all participants and each participant has read out the application so that informed consent is received.
"powerful company enables genocide in Gaza" first sentence flags this as a complete load of malarcky
Petitions accomplish nothing. Money talks, talking doesn't.
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.
Because some people are natural followers and won’t do anything unless there is a nice safe herd doing it. In this case we actually need a herd to push back against authoritarianism. And if people don’t feel empowered until they feel safe then enough protestors must stand up to create that critical mass. It’s a painful irony: people won’t mobilize because no one has mobilized. What makes it worse is the mocking of the protestors for having the courage to go first.
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.
>"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.
when the bills come due you just print more money :)
Nope. Government borrows money from investors. including big ones. at some points the investors might come back with a different proposal. peasants can potentially do something about it as well.
google “quantitative easing (QE)”
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.”
"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...
"AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying" - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
I love how Palantir is comically evil. Their logo being the Palantir from LoTR (duh) and all. It's wild to me lol. They don't even try to pretend anymore.
> A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran.
Ah yes, European issues
It's a European issue because we look to the US and now appreciate more than ever the need to introduce barriers to stop temporary fascist governments doing the same permanent damage they have done in the US. Our democratic systems are just as vulnerable to populist leaders taking power. One of those barriers we must erect is the elimination of corporation with unfettered access to institutional data that can be used by fascist governments to maintain or grow their power base.
It's quite odd how Europeans will see and describe themselves only in terms of being a US vassal.
they functionally have been since ww2. why is it odd that they have a clear understanding of their relative position to the hegemonic power?
China's been behind too, but at least they're trying something.
Things Palantir does in other countries is fine cause for not wanting it deployed in your own
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.
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.
Not yet because they’re not operating in Europe yet.
There are enough far-right (and generally Putin-aligned, like Hungary) forces on the continent that they’d love to feed.
> Not yet because they’re not operating in Europe yet.
They're definitely operating in Europe. They literally have 15 offices scattered around.
Also "ICE separate[s] families" is such a ridiculous mischaracterization it makes me question all their other arguments.
> ICE separate[s] families" is such a ridiculous mischaracterization
It's accurate. They do separate families. How or why doesn't matter, the fact stands in its own. It's not a "mischaracterization", it's a fact.
If context is irrelevant then every country in Europe already separates families, and thus how can this be a complaint?
Believe it or not, it's possible for more than one person or entity to do something. I know, it's really incredible to think about! John and Bill can both scam Elizabeth, even though they live in different countries!
But apparently I can't complain because they're both criminals and I can only complain about one! It says in the rulebook!
I'm not sure you've quite understood the conversation.
So do the police/courts if your dad goes to jail. It's incidental to their purpose.
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 Iran
So 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.
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?
I suspect that if Palantir had the same exact business model but the CEO had supported Kamala Harris, this campaign would not exist. Or if Palantir had said it supported targeting "fascists" the same people denouncing it would be supporters. So if you're actually serious about sovereignty it probably needs a whole campaign around that cause.
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?
Calling everyone you disagree with a 'bro' doesn't make your point any more convincing.
Chill bro it’s just a joke. Sensitive.
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
Hmm well except Oracle's owner..
> 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 as Meta paid them, no-one cares.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
No to Palantir in Europe
So you used voice dictation?
Europe needs its own Palatir
Say No to Subsidizing European Defense
or say yes? decel mentality like this is why europe is falling behind. some poor startup will try to backfill these contracts to be the new palantir of europe only to be cut at the knees by regulation and more outcry think piece boycotts like this. rinse and repeat until the us and china become the only relevant acceleration hubs on earth during the singularity
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.
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.
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
Half of the comments in this thread are expressing how they're very against the idea of something like Palantir "but European". It seems like some Europeans really believe that handicapping themselves is a good idea.
No. The means can spoil the end.
Can you explain the comparison because on its face and especially given the context in the link, I don't see the connection.
perhaps, but civil law is a negotiated contract including rights of all involved. If a tech conglomerate invents new applications, are they now exempt from civil law?
The era of the Nation State began when courts did have real means to enforce against powerful rogues. The suggestion that simply applying a new weaponized technology overrides the legal context is regressive.
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.
> 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 PostgreSQL
Sure, if you self-host it, this would be a stupid thing to say.
> Say No to Excel
A little worse: it's proprietary and who knows what it does and where it sends your data.
> Say No to Salesforce
Way worse: they host the data, and who knows what they do with it.
A lot of words but you could have simply searched to know that Palantir offers self hosting.
Palantir's founders and executives are aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.
Salesforce, Microsoft, and PostgresSQL contributors aren't bragging about how their products enable lethal military operations.
I think when people go 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 any business builds on top of foundry. But in this case since palantir itself 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 supplying them foundry, palantir can claim to be "just like postgres".
This all matters only if you're actually against gotham / automated surveillance, of course, and believe that it was not happening until alex karp.
Is their code open? Can you somehow attest that the data it ingests is fully under control of the client that uses the platform?
The comparison to PostgreSQL in particular is very poor in that regard.
You can self host it on premises. I think the comparison is fair for most of the products offered by Palantir.
Ok but then why? Or, what's your point here? Like what would explain the behavior you are noting if it really is that absurd and seemingly arbitrary? Is the implication that they just have really bad PR?