I don’t think this is true. Palantir are fundamentally a consultancy with a graph database and a map. They sell expensive “forward deployed engineer” consulting services to integrate things with their graph database and map. As far as I know they still don’t broker or share data - the customer provides the data and they provide the database and visualization. Has that changed?

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therobots927 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay so they have a “graph database” that transforms client data into actionable insights. I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.

	▲	bri3d 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not trying to make an ethical judgement here; personally, I think there is certainly a reckoning to be had given the role ICE have taken on, and I don't think that "we just make the platform" excuses culpability. However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve. > I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up. As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.