[tomaytotomato]

How are Palantir so effective (as this article is alluding)?

From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I think inefficiency, data siloing, politics and lack of communication between departments and also internally not communicating between teams. Not withstanding a lack of cooperating and willingness to change.

Did Palantir have a political mandate, or can they just cut through the bureaucracy or bypass it with technology?

[SilverBirch]

Are they effective? Do you have data on the number of people they've correctly identified vs false-positives. In fact, do you have any evidence they're even trying to limit false positives?

The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.

[ClarityJones]

If I understand correctly, you're saying that in a majority of cases (or something approaching that) the targets of these raids are not subject to lawful deportation?

I would be curious to have data / information showing that.

[ako]

Palantir's mission is to exactly solve the problem you're describing: break through data siloes to get better information. Core of the platform are data pipelines that can move data from any silo into the palantir data lake, where it can be analysed. Their forward engineering project approach probably enables them to bypass the organisational boundaries between departments. Their top-down selling approach ensures management assists bypassing organisational boundaries.

[JumpCrisscross]

> break through data siloes to get better information

This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.

In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.

[wavefunction]

"structured data transfers" yeah I've done those, difference is it wasn't to build fascDB or extract public monies at grossly over-inflated rates

[NVHacker]

You do know that Palantir is now in the UK and getting access to data through the same "health" channels, don't you ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56590249

[tomaytotomato]

UK government departments are slow and hostile to change, so I am skeptical that Palantir being parachuted in, would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it.

[javierpresnsr]

It is easy to be "effective" when you get paid to circumvent any check and balances

[blablabla123]

From what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway?

Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...

[lrvick]

They almost exclusively hire fresh grads who need money more than ethics, and it shows in everything they do.

[RobertoG]

who say they are effective? They just have contacts.

It's the privatization of what started as an intelligence program.

Recommended watching (The REAL Story Behind Palantir's Dystopian Pre-Crime Takeover (w/ Whitney Webb)):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3DFZFoJC5s

[JumpCrisscross]

> How are Palantir so effective?

What are you using to conclude their effectiveness?

It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP.

On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget.

[1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...

[xrd]

Whoa, that's the story! I don't see that referenced in the 404media story, do you have a link/summary for that?