Secrecy Unveiled:

How Palintir Technologies Steals Your Right to A Secret

Abstract

Secrecy and the maintenance of secrets have long been important sites of study for anthropology and other cognate disciplines, but few papers reflect on how the social power of secrets are supplanted when corporations are involved in taking secrets away from the individual. This paper reflects on the death of old notions of secrecy and the birth of modern notions of secrecy under a corporate capitalist system, and how previous anthropological thought on secrecy and power relations may be applicable to secrets. To do so, I examine how a data-mining company called Palantir displaces secrecy from the individual and their social sphere by constructing secrets as a piece of data to be bought and sold. Through examining previous anthropological thought and drawing on a case study of Palintir’s operating system, Gotham; I intend to show that Palintir positions itself as a ‘secret extractor’ and how his reputation grants the corporation social power. However, this social power is not taken at no cost to social well-being; the extractive and unethical practices that Palintir uses to gather secrets are not being properly addressed.