“Palantir does not need to own the data or even have stewardship. They can extract, transform and exploit the metadata to build their own rich picture.”

Sorry, but this is full on into conspiracy theory here. Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?

The exact same concerns could be articulated for Google/AWS/Azure, but nobody does because they would quite rightly be called out as conspiracy theorists.

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watwut 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Are we seriously arguing that Palantir are doing very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems, and somehow exporting those and aggregating them?

Is there any reason to think they would not do something illegal? Or that they would be above exporting secret data?

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crimsoneer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a very profitable company that has spent 20-ish years working with intelligence agencies from a bunch of different countries, I find it hard to believe they'd just casually commit some incredibly serious crime without evidence beyond "well, they theoretically could".

	▲	lyu07282 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> has spent 20-ish years working with intelligence agencies from a bunch of different countries This is supposed to count towards their integrity? There is no way your posts aren't satire, actually great job you almost convinced me lmao

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pjc50 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> very much illegal analysis on air-gapped national security systems

They're hosted by the US. It would be illegal for them not to comply with orders to hand data over to US security services. This has been a concern since the Microsoft "safe harbour" GDPR case. It's now the same thing with much higher stakes.

Since this: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr... , no US tech company can give a meaningful guarantee that they won't just turn off critical UK defence systems if ordered to by Trump. Such as if we tried to carry out actions against the invasion of Greenland. I admit that was a couple of months ago, so it now seems like ancient history, but the US picks a new invasion target every month.

	▲	alxhill 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They are _not_ hosting UK government data in the US. They offer on-premise and self-managed cloud offerings, which are often used where data sovereignty is important. Additionally, customers often manage access control - including for Palantir employees - themselves, so it would not be a simple "pull the power plug" if the US/UK relationship went awry.