Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals

Government Surveillance and Legal Workarounds

• Many see Palantir as a way for government to access data it could not constitutionally collect itself, effectively enabling warrantless mass surveillance.
• Commenters describe a progression: warrants → FISA → vague bulk requests → direct querying of giant private databases.
• “Parallel construction” is cited: data (legally or not) is used to identify a target, then traditional surveillance is used to create a clean evidentiary trail.
• Some argue there should be a landmark Supreme Court ruling that buying or outsourcing data collection still counts as a “search,” but others doubt the current Court would expand 4th Amendment protections.
• It’s unclear what legal theory would actually block the government from using commercial data brokers and contractors this way.

Health Data, Consent, and Hospital Power Structures

• Strong concern that patients effectively sign away data rights “under duress” when they need urgent care.
• Discussion that new hospitals and medical supply are heavily state-controlled, enabling regulatory capture and cronyism.
• One thread alleges complex arrangements where public or quasi-public hospitals hand data and money to contractors who then quietly benefit government and insiders; others push back that some of this veers into conspiratorial framing.

What Palantir Actually Does (Tech and Business Model)

• Competing views:
  • Just a software vendor (Foundry/Gotham/AIP) with analytics, pipelines, and versioned data handling.
  • Primarily a consultancy with “forward deployed engineers” who integrate disparate data into a schemaless store plus UI “widgets.”
• Supporters say it’s “better than what they had,” especially for clunky government environments, and praise its data-pipeline tooling.
• Critics argue the tech is not special; the real differentiator is top‑down sales to C‑suites that bypass internal bureaucracy, plus marketing gloss around terms like “ontology.”

Privacy, Democracy, and Corporate Power

• Several see Palantir as part of a broader surveillance capitalism ecosystem where the key harm is data collection itself, not the stated use (ads vs policing).
• Comparison is made to Cambridge Analytica, 1984 “telescreens,” and a public that has grown desensitized since the Patriot Act.
• Some equate NYC’s deal with authoritarian-style data practices (China/Russia analogies); others note that public hospital corporations are politically controlled anyway, so outrage is selective.
• There is recurring anger at the “taxpayer → contractor → lobbying” loop and calls to criminalize selling user data.

Value, Competition, and Valuation

• A few ask the pragmatic questions: does Palantir’s software actually deliver ROI for NYC hospitals, and what cheaper or open alternatives exist?
• Others focus on financials, calling Palantir a “welfare queen” with an inflated valuation sustained by government contracts and political connections, not pure product merit.