Palantir exists to improve privacy of citizen data within the government. Without it, government workers have massive, untraceable and unaccountable access to private data. (See Snowden for more info.)
I don't like that there's even a need for Palantir, but given the need, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad someone like Thiel is behind it.
I don't honestly care all that much about Palantir specifically (pros and cons, though lots of cons), but one thing they do not do by simply existing is help citizens protect their data. They do a lot of things, but not that.
Well, that's annoying. Here is what I meant to post, more or less:
Huh. So the argument to overcome objections to a system designed for ingesting, canonicalizing, normalizing, and correlating private data acquired via dubious means from dubious sources is that at least the access to and use of the data is controlled monitored and auditable, reducing the incidence of LOVEINT and similar abuses as compared to ad-hoc systems constructed on the sly?
That's really damning with faint praise, especially since Jevon's Paradox ensures that both the use AND abuse of such data will increase when you reduce the 'costs' of doing so, and that's assuming there is no unsanctioned/off-book/'black' use or egress of the data (which is far from assured, IMO, given what we know about the history of these systems and projects, eg. Total Information Awareness and Trailblazer vs. ThinThread).
I don't like that there's even a need for Palantir, but given the need, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad someone like Thiel is behind it.