You’ve enquoted “Palantir taking your data” as if it’s not factual, but the only one with data privacy guarantees here is USA Today.

You can’t “convert the sheer scale of our audience into known, orchestrated first-party relationships” without compromising your privacy.

If the storage is on US soil their contractual privacy declaration is meaningless. They can either be forced to hand over data or they can be backdoored to take it without their knowledge. They are becoming the Cloudflare of digital life patterns and that is a tempting target for the powers who want that data.

they were the one coming up with forward deployed engineers, weren't they? The least I would expect from this model is that I own the whole infra.

I've still never quite understood the difference between an FDE and a contractor SWE the client hires through their parent consultancy, other than that with the contractor it would be clearer the hiring company owns all the work, data and infra produced.

FDE sounds like they are allowed to open carry

Does sound like a nice perk. Having done the SWE consulting thing for a stint, you do start to dream of having lethal force as a backup for the more unpleasant clients.

Pessimistically I might think that the client demands data privacy and ownership on paper, but also doesn't want the liability of actually owning and maintaining or even touching their own vast stores directly. While the firm would love to learn from the data to better their systems... and more. So there's just a nice wink and a nod about what's not happening. But that is an uncharitable conspiratorial lens. I'm sure it's fine.