That's a weird comment. From what the OP described, the software is a data visualization tool. Palantir the company doesn't hold the data based on what the OP said. The govt or whoever gathered the data would be the owner of the data. It doesn't appear the Palantir software itself does the original data gather.

Right. But the data tool is designed to be integrated across municipalities via a shared schema -- this fundamentally changes the efficacy of the data -- it makes the data more valuable.

Palantir Gotham is used by the LA police department and the data integration creates new capabilities -- even if they keep the data. At the end of the day there will always be a trade-off between crime and surveillance. Palantir explicitly sides with surveillance.

It really doesn't matter who owns the data etc. The moral position of Palantir is very clear: that it supports surveillance.

Not sure why you're specifically against Palantir. Tableau basically does the same thing. Excel did it before either product. Police, NSA, CIA, FBI use Excel, AWS, GCP, Oracle, twitter, tor, bitcoin (insert any tech product) etc... If Palantir supports surveillance because their product can be integrated with municipal data, then virtually every tech company supports a surveillance state because any tool can be leveraged by these law enforcement entities to surveil a population more effectively.

what type of double speak is this? They literally sell data integration products with a specific focus on defense and police departments.

What you're implying is that someone that sells uranium to people that build bombs is just "a chemical supplier" .... like yeah the essence of what they are doing is the same, but the implications are totally different.

Shareholders only care about profits, nothing else.

Certainly many of them do, but there are also plenty of people who want to focus on investments that also have a positive impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing

One specific example of a robo-advisor that does this: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/feature/socially-responsi...

Do you share the same feelings about Google and Facebook? The level of user tracking undertaken by the aforementioned companies is staggering. Google and Facebook know practically everything about everyone. Both Google and Facebook have federal contracts and have for years.

exactly. FB and google collect data. Palantir doesn't. Just because a company runs warm and fuzzy super bowl commercials doesn't mean it's more ethical.