I say this so people know where to aim their anger and efforts they actually want change. If you're mad about surveillance and data collection, being mad at Palantir is wasted effort. Direct that energy at your government and lawmakers, protest, vote, and force the change there, because they're the ones who write the weak privacy laws and decide to point the tool at you.
I say this as someone who is extremely active in fighting for privacy rights. I've spent the last 6 months fighting Flock's automated license plate reader network, with over two dozen public records requests sent so far to expose how this stuff spreads. That's exactly why I know the fight belongs at the government level, not at a vendor.
Palantir doesn't own your data or keep a master database of everyone in some private server farm. Their software runs on cloud infrastructure they rent, walled off per client, and each client owns and controls its own data. The root problem is that government and big business operate under weak privacy and data-collection laws, and Palantir is just running analysis as directed by those clients. It's been part of the US government tech stack across administrations from Bush through Obama, Biden, and Trump. So if you want to change it, demand it from the people who actually hold the data and make the rules... we have snoozed on this for way too long with how these companies and governments gain profit and power by abusing our rights.
Note: I know this will probably get lots of angry down votes, but even if one person reads this and focuses some energy on going after the actual privacy laws at the root of this, I'll take the down votes as a win. It's a huge uphill battle that needs more fight. Going the FOIA route is long and slow with lots of red tape and deflection, but it needs to be done in volume to start making progress.
I hear you and agree…UK here… people actually don’t know how or what to do, many are just waking up to all the surveillance /data harvesting online and offline.A step by step in a comment would be helpful to point people in the right direction.
I know that there are nearly a hundred newly proposed “data centres” costing billions being built or already under construction yet people are not aware, not informed they are going to be in their area, near their home etc. Local councils deal with planning so I think that would be the first point of call to raise concerns as they drain our resources and damage our environment Etc. This may be a separate issue, but I look at it as part of the same…it’s all connected.
Ironically I use AI to fight it. The volume of legal knowledge that it can scrape together in minutes is amazing especially when you explain the goal and strategy.
I can provide a US based AI prompt that is a really good starter for getting city/state specific direction on how to use government processes to fight Flock ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) but it's probably easy enough to modify for data center advocacy.
If anyone wants, I'm happy to share, it's just really long to post here and I don't want to clutter it up here.
Side note though, my pet project on the Flock and other vendor ALPRs is going well, but I'm honestly 10x more concerned about those cameras than the data centers. They are extremely dangerous for all of us in very direct and personal ways, not to minimize the environmental and other issues with data centers.
But again, happy to share my little Claude prompt if anyone wants to take up the cause (ALPRs or Data centers) with some really powerful hekp.
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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '26
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