What Does Palantir Actually Do?
Wired – no paywall: “Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it. Palantir is arguably one of the most notorious corporations in contemporary America. Cofounded by libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the software firm’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli military has sparked numerous protests in multiple countries. Palantir has been so infamous for so long that, for some people, its name has become a cultural shorthand for dystopian surveillance…Xia was one of 13 former Palantir staffers who signed an open letter published in May arguing that the company risks being complicit in authoritarianism by continuing to cooperate with the Trump administration.
She and other former Palantir staffers who spoke to WIRED for this story argue that, in order to grapple with Palantir and its role in the world, let alone hold the company accountable, you need to first understand what it really is. It’s not that former employees literally don’t know what Palantir is selling. In interviews with WIRED, they spoke fluidly about how its software can connect and transform different kinds of data collected by government agencies and corporations. But when asked to, say, name its direct business competitors, two former Palantir employees who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, struggled to come up with anything.
“I still don’t know how to answer that question, to be honest,” says one. Juan Sebastián Pinto, who worked as a content strategist at Palantir and also signed the open letter, says it sells software to other businesses, a category commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as B2B SaaS. Another former staffer says Palantir provides “really extravagant plumbing with data.” Xia calls Foundry, one of Palantir’s flagship software platforms, “a collection of different applications” that customers use to “operationalize data.”
A fourth ex-employee dubbed Foundry a “super-charged filing cabinet.” While all of these descriptions are technically accurate, they could also apply to products from hundreds of other tech companies. So what sets Palantir apart?”
…A former Palantir staffer who has used Gotham says that, in just minutes, a law enforcement official or government analyst can map out who may be in a person’s network and see documents that link them together. They can also centralize everything an agency knows about a person in one place, including their eye color from their driver’s license, or their license plate from a traffic ticket—making it easy to build a detailed intelligence report. They can also use Gotham to search for a person based on a characteristic, like their immigration status, what state they live in, or whether they have tattoos…”