Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

What kind of databases were used in your case for the analysis? Was it only the databases you provided them? Or are there also some generic sources Palantir provides by default? Or do they even cross-reference data from different clients?



We used a variety of 3rd party records databases (think Lexis Nexus, TLO, etc.), government/police databases (NIPR, SIPR, HSIN, NCIC, LEO.gov, etc), internal databases, and state public records systems (think DMV). We only had databases which we owned or had access to. Palantir did not provide any actual data for my department. They did have pre-built connectors for certain data sources, and pre-built attribute models for tagging data, which I assumed were developed for previous customers. But the initial install of Palantir was empty, and only populated with our data sources. To my knowledge Palantir does not provide any data. I actually recall walking into a room and finding 3-4 Palantir engineers doing nothing but migrating data from our old intelligence software into the new Palantir system, mostly by hand.

I can say with 100% certainty that they did not cross-reference our data with other customers, because the software not sending any data back to Palantir was a primary stipulation of our purchase. I was always under the impression that no data was shared across customers, just code, connectors, and best practices. Our installation of Palantir was 100% local, none of the infrastructure sat in a vendor cloud environment or on Palantirs home servers.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: