Palantir is a mission-focused company. Our leadership team and founders, composed of California technologists and our allies in DC and beyond, are dedicated to working for the common good and doing what’s right — in addition to being deeply passionate about building great software and a successful company.
Palantir was developed by scores of engineers over several years in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to address the most complex information analysis and security challenges faced by the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities. Since then, we have realized that our software platform can be applied to virtually any data set requiring complex information analysis, collaboration, and security mandates, including in the fields of cyber defense, regulation and oversight, and healthcare.
Being the best is our passion, and Palantir is quickly developing a reputation as a game changing technology in each of our domains. Yet as our adoption grows, our responsibility to the common good becomes even greater. At Palantir, this means creating technology that reflects our commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties. That deeply felt commitment has been clear since the company’s inception and is evident in the company’s roster of advisors, leaders, engineers, and technology experts.
Palantir has consistently invested its own funds to ensure that the Palantir platform includes the privacy and civil liberties protections mandated by legal requirements such as those in the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act and recommended by nonpartisan experts such as the Markle Foundation. We believe Palantir is one of the few platforms – if not the only one – that does this across the board.
Putting our values to work, Palantir voluntarily developed new technologies and a rigorous framework to: protect privacy and civil liberties; empower policymakers and administrators to enforce legal, regulatory, and policy requirements; and, equally important, ensure that the implementation of all requirements is audited.
Palantir was built by technologists serious about protecting privacy and civil liberties. Members of our team have reached out to policymakers to make them aware of these capabilities, and to get their feedback on how we can ensure that these capabilities will be used to protect our citizens. For more information on privacy, civil liberties, and Palantir’s systems please contact inquiries@palantirtech.com.
Learn More
Whitepaper: Privacy and Civil Liberties Are In Palantir’s DNA (pdf)
Learn about the legal requirements that an information analysis platform must conform to and how Palantir was designed from the very beginning to comply with and exceed these requirements and recommendations.
Whitepaper: Hard Technical Problems in Civil Liberties Protection (pdf)
Protecting civil liberties requires solving a number of hard technical problems that invalidate most existing approaches to storing and using data. Learn about the technical challenges Palantir has addressed, and how our civil liberties protection is built into the technical foundation of every deployment.
Video: Protecting Privacy and Civil Liberties
Senior Counsel Bryan Cunningham, member of the Markle Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, discusses the importance of strong civil liberties protection for technologies operating on sensitive data. By placing data protection, security, and pedigree at the core of Palantir’s design objectives, our platform simultaneously satisfies the need for a rich, collaborative analytical framework and a secure, privacy-aware environment for conducting such analysis.
Press: A Tech Fix For Illegal Government Snooping? (NPR)
“Most people in America believe you can either fight terrorism — i.e., identify and get the terrorists — or you can protect our civil liberties — i.e., make sure the government isn’t looking at our personal information when they are not allowed to,” says Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp. “And that dichotomy used to be true. We’ve found a way to tag information so the only people who can see it are those who are allowed to see it, so it takes care of that problem.”