philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

What Does Palantir Actually Do?

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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. ...

Part of the answer may lie in Palantir’s marketing strategy. Pinto says he believes that the company, which recently began using the tagline “software that dominates,” has cultivated its mysterious public image on purpose. Unlike consumer-facing startups that need to clearly explain their products to everyday users, Palantir’s main audience is sprawling government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. ...

What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems. ...

Underneath the jargon and marketing, Palantir sells tools that its customers—corporations, nonprofits, government agencies—use to sort through data. What makes Palantir different from other tech companies is the scale and scope of its products. ...

Crucially, Palantir doesn’t reorganize a company's bins and pipes, so to speak, meaning it doesn’t change how data is collected or how it moves through the guts of an organization. Instead, its software sits on top of a customer’s messy systems and allows them to integrate and analyze data without needing to fix the underlying architecture. ...

Palantir’s software is designed with nontechnical users in mind. Rather than relying on specialized technical teams to parse and analyze data, Palantir allows people across an organization to get insights, sometimes without writing a single line of code. All they need to do is log into one of Palantir’s two primary platforms: Foundry, for commercial users, or Gotham, for law enforcement and government users. ...

Customers need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir itself does not provide any. ...

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. ...

He’s now deeply worried that an authoritarian state could use this power to “tell any narrative they want” about, say, immigrants or dissidents it may be seeking to arrest or deport. He says that software like Palantir’s doesn’t eliminate human bias. ...

When Gotham users connect disparate pieces of information about a person, it could seem like they are reading their whole life story, rather than just a slice of it.

“It's a really powerful tool,” says one former Palantir employee. “And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it.”

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does/