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.

> Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics

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.

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.

> 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.

It's on prem at the customer.

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's the customer has.

There's a bizarre conspiracy going around that Palantir is some all-seeing force in the world trying to turn everyone into mindless drones. In reality, it's just a company that—like it or not—has been relatively successful at securing massive contracts with the government and major corporations.

In a healthcare context, internal pricing and patient data are heavily protected by law. If Palantir were as guilty of surveilling your medical data as you allege, that would be tremendously illegal, and companies much larger and more influential would have strong legal grounds to sue it into oblivion. If you think Palantir has a tight grip on the government, consider the influence of the health systems it works with—some of which are the largest employers in their states. The idea that an all-powerful company can control the government doesn’t make sense if smaller companies, which donate less, are somehow exerting unchecked control over larger ones.

Of course, most of these concerns stem from two things: (1) its approach to autonomous warfare and (2) concerns about immigration surveillance. Autonomous warfare is coming, whether you like it or not. Palantir’s role in that is not related to its work in the commercial sector—unless you're suggesting they’re holding back potential revenue by not selling highly advanced robotics to corporate clients. Concerns about immigration surveillance are also somewhat overstated because, again, Palantir legally cannot use data from its commercial work (unless one of its clients severely mismanaged their contract). In that case, it’s really the U.S. government you should be criticizing — not the contractor simply trying to make money.