cheese_greaterHow does Palantir work, what is so special about what they do that some other big tech company wasnt already doing that or what is their moat?
They’re a data analytics platform: www.palantir.com/docs They got in close with the intelligence agencies early on and have some big money with connections behind them.
From what I’ve seen, though, they don’t “have your data” as that’s not their thing. A government that does have your data could use their analytics tools to do some highly dodgy stuff, though, which is why they’re popular with governments and feared by everyone else.
I think what they do is host an instance/shard of their tools for each customer, probably on a public cloud provider like AWS. Palantir manage the software, the customer provides the data.
Palantir’s engineers absolutely could have access to any data in their tools if they wanted it enough (they write the software, after all), but I would assume that there are various safeguards in place - the CIA absolutely wouldn’t want Palantir staff accessing their data, but on the flipside the CIA might be very keen for Palantir staff to help them access data owned by another country’s intelligence agencies…