Comment by jagged-chisel
8 hours ago
Why does Palantir specifically need to exist? To funnel those juicy government budgets into shareholders' pockets.
Why does anyone bother to use them? Because they have convincing marketing (which may or may not include buttering government palms with, um, "incentives" ...)
Occam's razor: It's a big pile of "list of things being handled by an outside entity so I neither have to think about it, nor hire for them."
If Palantir wasn’t highly effective at aggregating data no one would care about the. They are considered a threat to privacy and freedom because they are a good product
That's part of it, but not the whole story. If Palantir were a book, explaining how to implement data aggregation systems effectively, people wouldn't be so wary of it. (Critics would still criticise that data aggregation was performed in the first place, of course, but there wouldn't be the additional "and it's Palantir".)