They can be the precursor to other forms of action. It helps the activists find each other to get started, even if the pressure it generates isn’t enough to convince politicians.

Awareness can ultimately change things.

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.

Public opinion can def have effect if you live in a democracy. Politicians rather pay more for something else if they think it will help them / avoid hurt them. Might not work in America though.

They help raise awareness but, true, only work in conjunction with other actions.

Fortunately, I am aware of some of those other actions. E.g. pro bono legals taking the fight on, etc.

Because some people are natural followers and won’t do anything unless there is a nice safe herd doing it. In this case we actually need a herd to push back against authoritarianism. And if people don’t feel empowered until they feel safe then enough protestors must stand up to create that critical mass. It’s a painful irony: people won’t mobilize because no one has mobilized. What makes it worse is the mocking of the protestors for having the courage to go first.

And I am very happy about that superpower. Regulation is a very good thing, specially when wielded against US big tech.

No we can't. In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed. Europe is not a federation like the US, worse many of the countries in Europe themselves are governed much like federations. We are easy prey for big American corporations. It's easy for Palantir to sell their product and then a thousand little government organizations will claim there simply is no alternative at the same quality level.

Citing shit Palantir does in other countries is a fine justification for not deploying it in your own.

Not yet because they’re not operating in Europe yet.

There are enough far-right (and generally Putin-aligned, like Hungary) forces on the continent that they’d love to feed.

It's a European issue because we look to the US and now appreciate more than ever the need to introduce barriers to stop temporary fascist governments doing the same permanent damage they have done in the US. Our democratic systems are just as vulnerable to populist leaders taking power. One of those barriers we must erect is the elimination of corporation with unfettered access to institutional data that can be used by fascist governments to maintain or grow their power base.

Not before handing over an enormous cache of NHS patient data to them during the pandemic. If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.

Do you have a reference for this? There's been a lot of talk from ministers about reviewing contracts when break clauses allow, but I haven't seen anything definitive and this still seems to be a matter for individual departments.

Indeed. It is very disappointing that they chose that as the opening paragraph of their "Why" section, without even making the attempt to relate those points as to why Palantir in Europe would be bad for European citizens.

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?

The owners of the other companies are at least not as openly opposed to democracy, though.

Meta sure causes more damage right now, but banning Palantir, which wouldn't even cause big problems, is an absolute no-brainer

Even if it's nothing that would be a big win.

d.AP, itemis, datawalk, helsing.

There are a few alternatives, depending what you want.

Palantir's technology, as its own name suggests, is inherently dangerous, regardless of who controls it. The right alternative is to simply not build capabilities similar to Palantir in the EU - ideally, to legally forbid building them at all. This type of aggregated data flow simply gives too much control to whoever has access to it, and thus greatly harms democracy.

Why?

why would we need to fund and make Europen Alternative to Surveilance (tm) when we could just you know - not have it at all?

Pressure is building, thankfully. It's not just petitions now, but legal groups getting involved, etc. At least in the UK. Hopefully it spreads like wildfire around Europe. The orange Oompa Loompa is helping kindle those flames nicely.

So you used voice dictation?

"Palantir’s Architecture: Analyzing the Ethics of Surveillance AI" - https://erikabarker.ai/data-analysis/the-palantir-paradox-de...

"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...

Ex-Colleagues are launching a startup right now: No US-Services from the beginning on, only OpenSource and this new EU-Office thingy.

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.

Good news, Atlassian is technically an Australian company.

[delayed]

No. The means can spoil the end.