Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties. Since its inception, Palantir has invested its intellectual and financial capital in engineering technology that can be used to solve the world’s hardest problems while simultaneously protecting individual liberty. Robust privacy and civil liberties protections are essential to building public confidence in the management of data, and thus are an essential part of any information system that uses Palantir software.

A core engineering commitment

Some argue that society must “balance” freedom and safety, and that in order to better protect ourselves from those who would do us harm, we have to give up some of our liberties. We believe that this is a false choice in many areas. Particularly in the world of data analysis, liberty does not have to be sacrificed to enhance security. Palantir is constantly looking for ways to protect privacy and individual liberty through its technology while enabling the powerful analysis necessary to generate the actionable intelligence that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to fulfill their missions.

We believe that privacy and civil liberties-protective capabilities should be “baked in” to technology from the start rather than grafted onto it later as an afterthought. By seamlessly integrating these features into our software, we reduce user friction that might otherwise create incentives to try to work around these protections. With the right engineering, the technologies that protect against data misuse and abuse can be the same technologies that enable powerful data analysis.

Engaging with the policy community

We also believe that privacy and civil liberties-protective technical capabilities must be combined with a rigorous set of policies to maximize their effectiveness. Audit logs are only effective when they are reviewed, and access controls only protect information when they are used to limit data availability to those with particular needs and authorities. We work with our customers to advise them on how to use our technology to support effective privacy and civil liberties policies, and we educate advocates and policymakers as to our capabilities so that they can craft more informed law and policy.

Technological advances often raise novel privacy and civil liberties issues. Where the law is silent or undeveloped, Palantir consults with privacy and civil liberties advocates and some of the top legal experts in the world to figure out how to build our technology with safeguards that can be used as part of a responsible information handling regime. We obligate ourselves to do what is right, not just what is legal.

To that end, In October 2012, we created the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCAP), a group of privacy and civil liberties experts and advocates who will us in understanding and addressing the complex privacy and civil liberties issues surrounding our work in various fields. The PCAP helps us think about future developments in technology, how law and policy might change to account for that technology, and what steps Palantir might be able to take to help address these "over the horizon" challenges. Their insight is invaluable as we try to fulfill our duty as a good corporate citizen and design and build technology that can help to protect our fundamental rights.

But our obligations go beyond just our product and our customers. Palantir supports a number of privacy and civil liberties advocacy organizations around the world. We also are eager to lend our voice and technical expertise to academic and policy discussions that will shape the future of the fundamental freedoms that we hold dear.

We are proud of the work we are doing to ensure that data analysis is not just effective, but also reflects the values that are most important to us.

We take pride in designing, developing, and shipping great software. But our mission inspires us to be something more than just a product company. In a time of fiscal austerity and economic uncertainty, we deliver Silicon Valley culture to resource-constrained organizations in the form of powerful, open, extensible, and scalable platforms, on the backs of which people can solve their hardest problems and achieve world-changing outcomes. Finding foreclosure alternatives for troubled home lending assets. Improving operations while sending fewer soldiers downrange. Tracking down and rescuing missing and exploited children. These are just some of the extraordinary results that organizations have achieved with Palantir.

From Silicon Valley to your doorstep

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that would come to be known as Moore’s Law. The amount of computing power that could be manufactured at a fixed cost had been doubling roughly every 18 months, and he predicted that this trend would continue for at least another 10 years. Moore’s Law has held true for half a century, and it has become shorthand for the entire Silicon Valley ethos—the belief that it is in the very nature of technology to deliver more for less, and that dedicated engineers can make improvements at an exponential rate without similar increases in cost. We reject the notion that constrained budgets necessarily entail a constrained ability to achieve positive outcomes. For organizations in crisis, we deliver the best software, the best engineering minds, and the conviction that even the hardest data problems admit of elegant solutions.

A platform company shipping productized solutions

We are a platform company. That means we don’t create one-off solutions or solve the same problem from scratch over and over again. Instead, we ship open, extensible, scalable software platforms that can be deployed immediately against an entire class of problems facing a given industry. We also ship the world’s best engineering talent to optimize the software to meet a particular customer’s specific needs. By establishing a deep partnership with our customers, we can incorporate their requests and feedback directly into the future development of our software. This iterative process of continuous improvement produces productized solutions that can be implemented immediately at a fraction of the cost and with none of the risk of bespoke solutions.

Achieve world-changing outcomes

Organizations today are facing problems of unprecedented scale and complexity. These are the problems that get us excited. These are the problems we seek out. Our greatest satisfaction comes from deploying our software at an enterprise, iterating on a solution quickly, and delivering substantive results in weeks, not months. By following this model, we have helped organizations achieve outcomes that have never before been possible. Born in Silicon Valley, battle-tested in the field and the commercial marketplace, our data fusion platforms are revolutionizing the way data is analyzed across an extraordinarily diverse range of enterprises.

Our culture of openness, collaboration, and continuous innovation is reflected in the software that we develop. In designing and developing our data platforms, we seek to combine the benefits of a commercially developed product—efficiency, reliability, and value—with the benefits of an open system—collaboration, flexibility, and customization. Simply put, we believe that open software is better software, and we have seen time and time again how openness enables organizations to achieve extraordinary outcomes with their data.

Open architecture

An open, extensible or plug-in architecture promotes customization by enabling users to add and remove custom modules. Apple iOS is an example of software that features an open architecture. While iOS ships with a number of applications written by Apple developers, independent developers are also able to write applications that run on the iPhone. Open software platforms provide a base upon which developers can easily build new capabilities. Our platforms feature an open, plugin architecture that allows organizations to add applications specially suited to their use cases.

An open architecture also promotes collaboration.We know that software systems do not operate in a vacuum, and organizations need software that can integrate with their existing investments. An open architecture makes cross-platform interoperability possible. Our software has a proven record of interoperability with legacy systems and third-party software.

Open APIs

Open and public application programming interfaces (APIs) allow for decentralized customization and integration, directly empowering the user to develop new capabilities on top of the platform. Google Maps is an example of software with an open and public API. Web application developers can integrate Google Maps functionality into their applications by interfacing with the Google Maps API. Software platforms with open, public and documented APIs are significantly more agile, flexible, and powerful than their closed alternatives. Our open APIs are publicly documented so that anyone can potentially extend our software in new and amazing ways that we never imagined.

Open data

Organizations need to be able to access and understand their data despite whatever changes might be going on in their software environment. Systems get refactored, business processes change and analytical methodologies evolve. Data in closed, proprietary formats can be rendered inaccessible during these changes, risking the loss of crucial intelligence.

An open data platform maximizes data portability, making it easy for users to get their data both into and out of the system. A truly open data platform is one that can integrate data in closed, proprietary formats and export the same data in a variety of usable, non-proprietary, documented formats while maintaining data fidelity. Open data is like an escape hatch that protects users from vendor lock-in to any one software system. Our platforms combine comprehensive data integration capabilities, open standards data formats and flexible export options to give organizations total control over their data.

Open source

It’s impossible to talk about openness in software without addressing the topic of open source. Open source software is software that is made available for use along with the source code that was written to create the software itself. This allows anyone to include, modify, and enhance someone else’s work as part of their own software.

Palantir’s ability to rapidly build and ship innovative software owes a great deal to the availability of high-quality open-source software that is freely available to integrate as components of larger works. A few high profile modules we use to power various pieces of our technology stack are Lucene (an open source search engine), Cassandra (an open source data warehousing server), and Hadoop (an open source implementation of Google’s MapReduce programming framework for super-scalable computation).

As a group, Palantir’s engineers are bullish on the idea and reality of open source, so much so that we’ve started open sourcing pieces of technology that we’ve built from scratch so that other organizations can benefit from the work that we’ve done—we’re paying it forward. Our first set of releases took place in late 2011. They live on the public open source repository known as GitHub; you can find them here . Going forward, time and resource permitting, we’ll be identifying other pieces of our software that make sense to release as open source components and making them available to the public.

Data mining is a phrase that is used to describe a variety of techniques for using statistical algorithms to extract patterns and insight from raw data. From detecting simple credit card fraud to recommending movies to suggesting a good place to eat in a new city, these inference models play an increasingly active role in our daily lives, and often for the better.

But data mining has its limitations. From a technical perspective, data mining techniques work best when three conditions are met:

• The nature and composition of the underlying data are not changing over time
• The data is complete and clean
• You have some idea of what you're looking for

If your data problem has these features, automated data mining techniques will often find most of the answers you seek. But if your problem doesn't have these features, a different approach is likely to produce a better outcome.

Our software is designed to solve the hardest, messiest data problems data problems in the world, which tend to have the following characteristics:

• The data comes from many disparate sources
• The data is incomplete and inconsistent
• You're looking for someone or something that doesn't want to be found, and that can adapt to avoid detection.

These problems also have a social aspect that's often overlooked: no one wants machines to be the final arbiter when people's lives and livelihood are on the line.

In these contexts, the algorithmic approach fails. So we do something else. Our data platforms are designed to surface the totality of known data about a problem in a way that's easily digestible by the best pattern matching and inference machinery ever devised: the human brain. Our software is designed to augment human intelligence through a symbiosis of mind and machine. You can think of our systems as an array of exponential levers to move data, levers operated by human mental might and insight. Any conclusions reached are done so by the person, not the algorithm.

Although our products are complex and fairly difficult to design and build, they serve a single, simple goal: surfacing data as information so that people can make sense of what's going on.

Palantir was founded on the principle that we all have a responsibility to create a better world. We try to meet this responsibility by working on the hardest problems we can find. These are problems that are too big or require too much information for humans to solve alone; similarly, these problems are too sophisticated or too subtle to be effectively solved by computers alone. These problems require both humans and computational systems—working together.

Answering the need for financial assistance

Many problems in the modern world—from counter-terrorism to economic modeling—share these qualities. However, one thing these problems don't always have is a financial interest in finding the solution. The world is filled with nonprofit organizations working on problems like monitoring low-intensity conflict, natural disaster response, alleviating poverty, fighting the spread of disease, increasing volunteerism, safeguarding the environment and supporting the families of fallen warriors. Along the way, these organizations are collecting high-quality data about these serious issues, but often lack the financial resources and expertise to effectively use this data to make a difference.

A team of engineer-philanthropists

This is why Palantir has a philanthropic engineering team. We have full-time engineers, aided by volunteers from across the company, who focus their time and effort on hard pro bono problems—even if those problems don’t benefit our bottom line.

We partner with organizations like the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, Direct Relief International, Humanity United, Institute for the Study of War and The Grameen Foundation, to name a few. We help them use their data to succeed in their collective mission of improving the world we live in.

Once we've identified a organization we'd like to work with, we donate exactly the software, services and support that a paying Palantir customer would get: we work to integrate their data into our data platforms, train their analysts and help them make sense of their data.

By combining our world-leading technology with our deep mission-driven desire, we believe that we really can make the world a better place—one solution at a time.