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.

Things Palantir does in other countries is fine cause for not wanting it deployed 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.

Also "ICE separate[s] families" is such a ridiculous mischaracterization it makes me question all their other arguments.

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

> 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.

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...

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 likely 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...

Palantir is part of the IDF's kill chain. In Gaza that means supporting the automated targeting systems that choose targets with little to no human oversight, and then the automated tracking systems that follow targets until they are at home with their families so that the entire family can be killed at once.

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.”

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.

I of course do not know your specific usage and requirements, but Berlin-based OpenProject might be a suitable and mature Jira-alternative for you - in addition to being outside US jurisdiction their services are available both on-prem/self-hosted and cloud-based.

They even have a specific Jira-migration tool: https://www.openproject.org/docs/installation-and-operations...

Jira is Australian.

Not at all. It's against using Palantir specifically, not against the idea of something like Palantir "but European".

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

No. The means can spoil the end.

perhaps, but civil law is a negotiated contract including rights of all involved. If a tech conglomerate invents new applications, are they now exempt from civil law?

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.

Can you explain the comparison because on its face and especially given the context in the link, I don't see the connection.

No, because gunpowder has no loyalty, no terms of service, no American CEO who can be forced to testify before Congress and say interesting things about European defense customers or provide lists of who has a tattoo or not.

Oh man I'm in NL, didn't know that, that's. .. dark.

Is their code open? Can you somehow attest that the data it ingests is fully under control of the client that uses the platform?

The comparison to PostgreSQL in particular is very poor in that regard.

Ok but then why? Or, what's your point here? Like what would explain the behavior you are noting if it really is that absurd and seemingly arbitrary? Is the implication that they just have really bad PR?

> This headline might as well say 'Say No to PostgreSQL' or 'Say No to Excel' or 'Say No to Salesforce', etc. Wild.

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.

I think when people go against palantir, they are specifically against gotham - their govt/intelligence-only product. It is true that gotham is an app built on top of foundry just like any business builds on top of foundry. But in this case since palantir itself is the one building it (and heavily marketing it may I say) they get the bad rep for 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.