> Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
"Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe" - https://www.euractiv.com/news/palantir-is-well-on-its-way-to...
https://www.privacynieuws.nl/binnenlands-nieuws/politie-en-j...
they're giving startups an awful name in the eyes of the people, supposedly by the guy teaching others how to do startups, good grief
https://www.ft.com/content/2d2b1af1-edea-4fd0-a081-3811e34bc...
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
I'm already moving most of my clients out of any US-based offering.
Azure and Jira are sticky, but they'll be out sooner or later.
I think more companies will join the train? Esp new & smaller ones, for sure there is no option for bigCorp like ASML to be free of US-cloud, but maybe its gaining traction.
I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.
All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.
I paints the picture of it being mostly a hyped marketing wrapper around Nextcloud that hasn't even launched yet.
But since this administration has started to threaten allies and keeps this nonsensical trade balance and tariffs argument (which never accounts for the very bulk of what US really exports: IT and financial services which are never included in the trade balance nonsense) you need to answer in some way.
And with tensions rising staying on US services is becoming a strategic risk.
Given the growing demand to move away from US services and towards European alternatives, I wonder what the US will look like in 10 years if this move gains significant momentum.
They even have a specific Jira-migration tool: https://www.openproject.org/docs/installation-and-operations...
You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.
The hard work is integration and data workflows, that is hard work regardless of the chosen “exploitation interface”.
Which is why we had such destructive wars in the past..
why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?
There are a few alternatives, depending what you want.
If USA weren't the one safeguarding (contentious but please read on) the world and its modern interests then we would end up with something much worse.
If you only focus locally, it is quite easy to dismiss any form of killing, any form of surveillance and any form of inconvenience. This is "Defund the Police" meme all over again.
I gain social points by showing my disgust against the killings and murder done by the west. I gain nothing by promoting what they safeguard and promote that is necessary for the world to function. Such dynamics will lead to self ownage at the long run but social status points for oneself in the short term.
Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.
We don't bother doing that because it's a waste of time.
> I gain social points
You gain no social points.
It literally isn't. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
I could not find any information on what kind of influence a online-petition on wemove.eu would have...
However
> A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran
So does Google, so does Meta, so does Oracle. What do you think all that Palantir software runs on in the clouds? On Palantir's own huge datacenters? They don'thave those. The huge bulk of it runs on it on clouds provided my Microsoft, Amazon, Google.
Meta in particular causes such ridiculously larger amounts of societal damage that focusing so much energy on Palantir specifically is a dead giveaway it's not really about harm caused, it's about optics. Because they themselves likely use WhatsApp and Instagram, yet they don't knowingly use Palantir products.
If you're going to single out one US tech company as "we need to stop cooperating with them", I don't see how it can be any other than Meta. It's like telling someone morbidly obese to stop eating a single cookie per day rather than the 5 cheese pizzas they're also having. Maybe the cookie is slightly worse per gram, but it's also completely ineffective to focus on.
As someone who strongly supports European digital sovereignty and eliminating dependency on the US, I'm frankly very tired of so damn much of the activist discourse around these issues revolving around US-centred topics. Yes, sure, Gaza is not the US, and the US-Israel war with Iran is bad for Europe, but those are damn well not the reasons we should say no to Palantir.
If the Israel-Gaza conflict hadn't reignited a couple of years ago and thus Gaza wasn't on everybody's minds, and if the Iran attacks hadn't (yet) happened, should we then have nothing to say as to why we don't want Palantir than it's provision of services for internal US immigration policies? Maybe I should be grateful they haven't also listed Palantir being involved in period-tracking of American women in the wake of the reversal of Roe-vs-Wade.
Jesus Christ, won't the most vocal pro-European activists please stop making everything about US talking points, and start being able to take a stance from basic principles and our own interests?
Meta's products also profited off of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. [0]
The lawsuit won't do anything, the employees at Meta are happy with all of that and Meta does not care.
Anyone would have to be morally bankrupt to work at any of those companies and then knowingly put ex-$COMPANY in their bio as a badge to show they helped contribute to a genocide instead of stopping it.
So as long as Meta paid them, no-one cares.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/amnesty-report-finds-face...
Suffragettes were ridiculed for collecting petitions in support of women’s right to vote. Who cares about papers filled with women’s signatures? How could that change something as fundamental as who gets to vote in a democracy?
The power of Big Tech money in today’s Western democracies is a similar tenet that’s just taken for granted. How could it ever change? Until it does, and then it looks obvious it had to.
Having ability to choose between 2 sides of the same ass does not look like much of democracy. Never mind the money the candidate has to have and where this money comes from. And what happens to this democracy when the bills come due and the interest on government borrowing "on behalf" can no longer be paid.
Fortunately, I am aware of some of those other actions. E.g. pro bono legals taking the fight on, etc.
Out of technical curiosity,where do we find more on how Palatir is helping technically?.
Types of ML jobs they are running?
Open source or AI models they are using.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
>Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
>“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
"All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign" - https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deport...
"‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid" - https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
"The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2022.2...
"ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data" - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palan...
"How one company – Palantir – is mapping the nation’s data" - https://theconversation.com/when-the-government-can-see-ever...
"AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying" - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
Ah yes, European issues
Also, shit done elsewhere will be repeated in all other places, no reason to doubt that.
There are enough far-right (and generally Putin-aligned, like Hungary) forces on the continent that they’d love to feed.
They're definitely operating in Europe. They literally have 15 offices scattered around.
It's accurate. They do separate families. How or why doesn't matter, the fact stands in its own. It's not a "mischaracterization", it's a fact.
But apparently I can't complain because they're both criminals and I can only complain about one! It says in the rulebook!
It's literally at the very top of the article:
- Stop signing new contracts with Palantir.
- Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
- Invest in transparent, publicly accountable European alternatives.
And Palantir isn't like gunpowder, so I'm not even sure the analogy had any legs to begin with
The era of the Nation State began when courts did have real means to enforce against powerful rogues. The suggestion that simply applying a new weaponized technology overrides the legal context is regressive.
Salesforce, Microsoft, and PostgresSQL contributors aren't bragging about how their products enable lethal military operations.
Wat? These are wildly different things:
> Say No to PostgreSQL
Sure, if you self-host it, this would be a stupid thing to say.
> Say No to Excel
A little worse: it's proprietary and who knows what it does and where it sends your data.
> Say No to Salesforce
Way worse: they host the data, and who knows what they do with it.
If XYZ Inc. built gotham with palantir supplying them foundry, palantir can claim to be "just like postgres".
This all matters only if you're actually against gotham / automated surveillance, of course, and believe that it was not happening until alex karp.
The comparison to PostgreSQL in particular is very poor in that regard.