Yes, that was my thought. Contact tracing is likely the top reason Singapore. S. Korea (and to a lesser extent Japan) were able to selectively & aggressively contain infections, along with active policing and enforcement. Palantir's core focus is on databases for tracking "assets" with a geographic component, so it would seem like a natural application.
If this reduces the need and application for nation-wide bans like contact tracing did in Singapore than whatever the cost it will be a rounding error.
> than whatever the cost it will be a rounding error.
"Whatever the cost" disregards the non-monentary costs of giving a player like Palantir access to this data. If you need to implement digital help for contact tracing, at least pretend to do it in a privacy-preserving manner (plenty of attempts out there). There's no need to give surveillance data to the security apparatus of another country just because they have a few spreadsheets already.
It’s also pretty decent at constructing social networks and interaction graphs form different types of data which is what they pitch for fraud detection and tracing.
Basically one of their only models that actually works seems to be suited for contact tracing nearly perfectly.
I understand the reservations of people here regarding the company itself tho, but I’m not against it as a blanket statement.
E.G. on prem installation on German government servers with German staff doesn’t seem like an overreach, especially considering that the German government is already a client.
> Contact tracing is likely the top reason Singapore. S. Korea (and to a lesser extent Japan) were able to selectively & aggressively contain infections, along with active policing and enforcement.
If this reduces the need and application for nation-wide bans like contact tracing did in Singapore than whatever the cost it will be a rounding error.