Correcting the Record on Palantir in Australia
Editor’s Note: This blog post responds to allegations published by the Digital Rights Watch in relation to Palantir’s work in Australia. We believe it’s important to address misconceptions about our technology and business practices with transparency and factual accuracy.
Introduction
Advocacy group Digital Rights Watch (DRW) has the important mission of ensuring “that Australians are equipped, empowered and enabled to uphold their digital rights”. That mission is underpinned by their guiding principle of accountability: “We are trustworthy, honest and have integrity”.
We take them at their word. Which is why we were surprised by the contents of their recent report, Palantir in Australia. It seems that DRW did not avail itself of the extensive information about our technology and business model available online. Nor did they reach out to us ahead of publication.
And so not having had the opportunity to engage with DRW, and in a continued effort to hold those operating under the banner of accountability to a comparable standard in their own conduct, we believe it is necessary to correct DRW’s false and egregiously misleading claims here in this blogpost.
As always, we are open to engaging on these or other claims with any stakeholders for whom genuine accountability and truthful reporting actually matter.
Specific Claims to Address
Nearly every sentence in DRW’s post includes some errant claim. For the sake of brevity, we generally provide rebuttals only to the first instance of their false assertions.
“If you’re not familiar with the surveillance giant Palantir, you should — because they already know plenty about you.”
The reality is that Palantir knows nothing about you. Why would we? We are a software company — not a data company, and not a surveillance company. Unlike the social media, online retail, and search giants among DRW’s donors, we have no interest in surveilling our customers’ data or using it for our own commercial purposes.
We make money by selling enterprise software licenses that our customers use to integrate, govern and act on the data they lawfully hold, both more effectively and more responsibly.
“Primarily a defence contractor, Palantir Technologies specialises in data integration and surveillance analytics.”
We’re immensely proud of our work with Western and allied militaries — including the Australian Defence Force. But we are not “primarily a defence contractor.” In the last quarter of 2025, almost half our revenue came from commercial customers. And our government work extends far beyond defence — e.g. helping England’s National Health Service carry out more operations, Germany’s police forces prosecute child abuse and organised crime, and the United States’ National Institutes of Health discover new cancer treatments.
“Palantir’s approach to privacy and transparency is broadly terrible. The company specialises in creating detailed profiles of people by combining large databases about us.”
Both statements are patently false. Our founding purpose was to enable institutions to better act on their data, without needing to trade off rights to privacy and other civil liberties. That mission is now encoded through world-leading security and data governance technologies — whether granular and purpose-based access controls, or audit-logging that provides visibility into how data is transformed, accessed and used.
We’ve written extensively about many of these technologies on our blog. They’re why we’ve long been trusted by some of the world’s most security-conscious and highly-regulated institutions, whether in healthcare, insurance, or law enforcement.
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Palantir does not “combine large databases” to create “detailed profiles of people”. Again, we are not a data company.
“ Amnesty International has reported that, with these programmes, Palantir is facilitating human rights abuse.”
We reject the claim that we facilitate human rights abuses. The 2020 Amnesty International report cited by DRW includes our response to its claims. We encourage readers to review this response for themselves.
We work in fields — defence, healthcare, law enforcement, national security, and otherwise — where different fundamental rights and societal imperatives may be in tension with one another. Rather than retreating from this complexity, we embrace it — including as an engineering challenge. We started Palantir by building novel access control technologies to prove that privacy and security need not always be mutually exclusive. More recently, our work on civilian protection capabilities addresses the international humanitarian law tensions between human rights and the security needs of nation states.
Across both our software’s development and its use, we think deeply about these tensions and how our software and engineers intermediate them.
Retreating from complex and controversial fields, such as defence, law enforcement, and immigration, may bring feelings of comfort and self-satisfaction. But retreat is not a rights-protective stance.
It’s worth noting that our software is also deployed against much less controversial, but nonetheless essential, humanitarian missions — from fighting human trafficking and documenting war crimes, to supporting disaster relief and aid delivery.
At present, there is no public reassurance that Palantir’s privacy-invading systems are not being used here in Australia.
We do not deploy “privacy-invading systems” anywhere. As noted, we provide software that helps our customers govern and use the data they lawfully hold , in accordance with all local laws — including, in Australia, the Privacy Act 1988 and the legislation described in the correspondence from the Minister of Finance’s office. Our track record, and the trust our Australian customers have placed in us over many years, reflects this.
“Palantir collects data in Australia but is unrestricted in where it stores the data and who it allows to access it. As a U.S. based company, Palantir is subject to American laws that allow access to foreign data.”
This is fundamentally mistaken. Palantir does not collect any data — again, we are not a data company. Our software provides our customers with maximum control over how they secure, govern, and use their data. That extends to where they host it — whether in customer-managed “on-premises” infrastructure or in public-cloud infrastructure (including in Australia-specific cloud regions). All our Australian government work is hosted on Australian sovereign cloud infrastructure.
Our work in Australia is governed by Australian law. Being US-headquartered doesn’t mean the US Government or any third party has access to our customers’ data. Except for the limited purpose of providing technical support at our customers’ instruction, Palantir itself doesn’t have access to its customers’ data — let alone any right or practical ability to hand it to third parties.
“Palantir is under no obligation to follow any of the advice provided by their own Privacy and Civil Liberties Advisor team. Their actions suggest they do not.”
Our Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties — a group of independent and international experts in privacy law, civil liberties, policy, and ethics — performs an important advisory and scrutiny function. Yet our commitment to privacy and civil liberties doesn’t depend on any single advisory body. It is embedded in our engineering, our culture, and our business practices.
“The Albanese government must take steps to prioritise our human rights, privacy, and digital sovereignty over Palantir’s dystopian surveillance profiteering.”
In the ways described above, we believe we support rather than diminish human rights (including the right to privacy), while engaging with their real-world complexity. And we think that by supporting Australian institutions’ effectiveness, together with their ability to govern and use their data in accordance with local law and norms, we support Australia’s digital sovereignty.
Conclusion
Digital Rights Watch has an important mission, and we would have welcomed the opportunity to address its many incorrect claims prior to publication. We would welcome the opportunity to engage with them directly in the future.
We are committed to transparency around the development and responsible use of our products, and hope that future reporting on us is accompanied by good faith dialogue.
