Man, I really wish the paranoia around Palantir would die. It's a federated database search system, and that's it. It searches multiple databases, and returns combined results. With all this complete paranoia around it as a company, people seem to have the impression that it's magically summoning data out of thin air, when in reality it's a glorified JOIN statement (obviously a simplification, but you get the sentiment).
Yeah, Thiel is more conservative than most big names in tech, but that's not surprising given that Palantir started focused on the national defense space.
Oh, and "PRISM"? Yeah, that's just a data importer. Completely separate from the secret CIA project, it's just a classic naming conflict. It was originally named "Palantir Data Importer" or something of that ilk, but Palantir loves fancy names, so re-branded it Prism (which is actually a clever name, as prisms takes white light and separates it into colors, much like the importer takes unstructured or semi-structured data and separates the entities and relationships).
Yeah, Thiel is more conservative than most big names in tech, but that's not surprising given that Palantir started focused on the national defense space.
Oh, and "PRISM"? Yeah, that's just a data importer. Completely separate from the secret CIA project, it's just a classic naming conflict. It was originally named "Palantir Data Importer" or something of that ilk, but Palantir loves fancy names, so re-branded it Prism (which is actually a clever name, as prisms takes white light and separates it into colors, much like the importer takes unstructured or semi-structured data and separates the entities and relationships).
Source: Am former Palantir engineer