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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
"Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe" - https://www.euractiv.com/news/palantir-is-well-on-its-way-to...
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
https://www.ft.com/content/2d2b1af1-edea-4fd0-a081-3811e34bc...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.
I paints the picture of it being mostly a hyped marketing wrapper around Nextcloud that hasn't even launched yet.
They even have a specific Jira-migration tool: https://www.openproject.org/docs/installation-and-operations...
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.
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 don't bother doing that because it's a waste of time.
> I gain social points
You gain no social points.
It literally isn't. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
The hard work is integration and data workflows, that is hard work regardless of the chosen “exploitation interface”.
why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?
There are a few alternatives, depending what you want.
I could not find any information on what kind of influence a online-petition on wemove.eu would have...
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.
Meta sure causes more damage right now, but banning Palantir, which wouldn't even cause big problems, is an absolute no-brainer
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?
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...
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.
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.
Fortunately, I am aware of some of those other actions. E.g. pro bono legals taking the fight on, etc.
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.
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.”
"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...
Ah yes, European issues
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.
Also, shit done elsewhere will be repeated in all other places, no reason to doubt that.
There are enough far-right (and generally Putin-aligned, like Hungary) forces on the continent that they’d love to feed.
They're definitely operating in Europe. They literally have 15 offices scattered around.
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
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.
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.
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.
The comparison to PostgreSQL in particular is very poor in that regard.