By Sam Roux
Alex Karp has always stood out to me, ever since I've been aware of him, for how authentic of a person he seems to be. It is fairly easy for others to lay criticism at his feet for being the founder and CEO of Palantir, a company that has drawn some national ire, but in my mind this is largely a result of how opaque Palantir's marketing material is. Not many people really understand what they do because they don't make any real effort to tell people what they do.
What Palantir does is data analytics. They take data that businesses already have access to and use it to make more intelligent business decisions. More specifically, they have a number of platforms that are designed to interface with an existing operation and autonomously manage it through the use of AI.
This is extremely similar in nature to the concept behind NashTwin, primarily because NashTwin was heavily inspired by Palantir's existing product line. Our goal with the software was to create a Palantir-type feature lineup at a radically cheaper price point.
All of this is to say that what Palantir does, although obscure, is not exactly a mystery and not neccessarily evil. The type of data that Palantir is concerned with collecting is mostly relational data that describes the state of organizations and systems. That means locking down critical supply chains of things like uranium and helium-3 so that terrorists can't build a dirty bomb. Palantir is not concerned with what you ate for lunch or what car you drive. Palantir is not built on a business model that needs to be sustained by behavioral profiling of individual citizens.
But do you know who is concerned with what you ate for lunch or what car you drive? Do you know who is psychologically and behaviorally profiling you for profit? Microsoft and Google, whose business models are very much sustained by advertising! And yet, in my experience, the critics of Palantir — supposedly this evil surveillance company — never say a word about the major cloud providers and the absolutely absurd amount of telemetry and other types of data that they collect.
And this is a shame, because it means that Palantir ends up in the same bucket of public discussion as companies like Flock for no fault other than a lack of marketing material. Flock, of course, purports to be "solving crime" by treating the social contract as if they were minmaxing a Dungeons and Dragons character and placing cameras in children's gymnasiums so that they can spy on kids on the taxpayer dime. Their CEO, Garrett Langley, compared anti-Flock advocates to terrorists and only apologized after 50+ cities cancelled their contracts with Flock. Langley also famously claims that Flock "doesn't force it upon anyone who doesn't want it," but the organization is has already had multiple controversies over using signatures from police chiefs and city managers to deploy Flock cameras without city council approval. It's a shame that Palantir, which is by all rights a company founded on American excellence and innovation, ends up being treated as if it were the same as an organization that has many times now lied to the public and operates seemingly specifically to harass average citizens.
I think that if Alex Karp was serious about clearing up what Palantir does he would go on television tomorrow and say, "Look. We're the good guys, stupid. We're not a bad guy company. Tracking you is not our business, and we don't do evil stuff with our data." I think if Garrett Langley was serious about not invading people's privacy, he would have a change of heart and immediately shut down his business. In both cases, it seems apparent that neither of these things are going to happen. Palantir will continue being intentionally vague about their business model, and Flock is perfectly happy to continue implementing authoritarian mass surveillance tech.
The real tragedy here is not that we're being surveilled. Unfortunately, that's the price of modern infrastructure. The real tragedy is that we're being surveilled by companies that are dishonest about it, while the companies that are honest — or at least transparent — get lumped into the same bucket of distrust. Until Palantir steps up and tells the American public what they actually do, and until companies like Flock face real consequences for their deception, the public discourse around surveillance will remain poisoned. We'll continue to fear the wrong enemies while the actual wolves operate in plain sight, wrapped in PR speak and government contracts. The solution isn't to abandon data analytics or enterprise intelligence; it's to demand honesty from the people who wield these tools.