Posts by John

Don’t Just Trust Us

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Team was in Brussels, Belgium, in January for the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference, a three-day meeting of academics, NGOs, government officials, and corporations concerned about legal and technological issues related to the protection of privacy. In addition to a number of interesting panel discussions, the conference was an [...]

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Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Video Analytics: Part 1

During the past year and a half, Palantir has been developing Palantir Video, a video analytics application that will allow Palantir Gotham users to better integrate video information into the rest of their analyses. The initial Palantir Video functionality will be limited to basic playback capabilities and the ability for a user to tag individuals [...]

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Announcing the Palantir Council on Privacy and Civil Liberties

Last month, at Palantir’s GovCon8 event, our CEO, Dr. Alex Karp, announced the creation of the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCAP). This Council of experts has been created to assist us in understanding and addressing the complex privacy and civil liberties (P/CL) issues surrounding the use of our platform to [...]

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A Study in Cell Phones

A recent story in the New York Times, “More Demands on Cell Carriers in Surveillance,” describes the response by cellular service providers to an inquiry from Rep. Edward J. Markey, in which the service providers reported on the frequency of requests for subscriber information by law enforcement agencies. In 2011, carriers responded to more than [...]

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Code is Law… But Law is Pretty Important Too

In our “There’s an app for that!” world, it seems hard to believe that you can’t just “code away” any privacy problems that might arise with the use of information technology. Shouldn’t it be possible to prevent the rogue government official from using law enforcement databases to stalk his ex-wife? Can’t we build a system [...]

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Welcome to the P/CL Blog

Keeping “well enough informed” in the complex, rapidly changing world of “big data” is no easy task. Every day, we become better able to extract information from the world around us and put it to use. Often, these uses are beneficial. Easy access to more and better data can dramatically improve work in a wide variety of fields, from countering terrorism, to fighting fraud at banks, to charting the spread of disease, to more efficiently distributing food in conflict zones.

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