I think you’re straw manning his position. I also don’t think this was an “argument” — it seemed pretty clear (to me, at least) that we were discussing in good faith.

Many people simply don’t know the extent of what Palantir is doing. That’s why I started with “just a heads up in case you don’t know”: why excoriate people who may not even know what’s going on?

Yeah, I think there's some base instinct for things to be black and white, like a company/person/whatever is either totally exonerated or fully evil. Basically everything in the real world is some shade of gray.

That said, let me try to convince you that while Palantir might not be black per se, their shade is really, really dark.

Palantir's Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement

The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide:

If police have a name that's associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they've been, and when they've been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.

With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database.

How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World

It’s hard to square this purported commitment to privacy with proof, garnered from documents provided by Edward Snowden, that Palantir has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world. Notably, the partnership has included building software specifically to facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE, one of the most expansive and potentially intrusive tools in the NSA’s arsenal. According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” For the NSA and its global partners, XKEYSCORE makes all of this as searchable as a hotel reservation site.

Palantir Knows Everything About You

The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brayne calls the secondary surveillance network: the web of who is related to, friends with, or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn’t suspected of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates, says Brayne, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big-data policing at Princeton University and who’s now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties,” she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she adds, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure, and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John’s International Inc. and Pizza Hut LLC.

The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm’s ties to ICE under attack by employees

ICE agents relied on Palantir’s ICM system during a 2017 operation that targeted families of migrant children, according to an ICE document published in May by Mijente and the Intercept, an online news service. As part of the mission, ICE agents were instructed to use ICM to document any interaction they have with unaccompanied children trying to cross the border. If the agency determined their parents or other family members facilitated smuggling them across the border, the family members could be arrested and prosecuted for deportation, the ICE document said.

Obviously nothing is totally homogenous, and we all have to draw our own lines about at what point one part tips the scales for the rest. I recently turned away a recruiter from Facebook because they've reached the point where their constant privacy violations outweigh everything else, but I can appreciate that not everyone sees it that way.

With regard to Palantir in particular, there are other companies such as Thorn that seem to be fighting human trafficking without also enabling ICE to round up immigrants.

Sorry, design is political.

Hi! Just a heads up in case you're not aware — Palantir builds software to help ICE round up immigrants and their families, so they may not be a company you want to represent this platform. A lot of potential customers are probably driven away by seeing their name on there. Which is a shame, because this looks really cool!

Thank you so much! I'm working as fast as I can to add things like that :)

Thank you! A bunch of people have said that actually. At some point I'll have to bite the bullet, break out iMovie and make a proper video.

There's a project called Marzipan in the works to allow iOS apps to be easily ported to macOS, but they're definitely not trying to merge the two operating systems.

I just want to point out that it's all, not both. The reason to use "latinx" rather than earlier terms such as "latin@" is that "latinx" acknowledges that people may not identify as male or female — truly gender-neutral, as Pablo says :)