Reference

Iliadis, A., & Acker, A. (2024). The Palantir Files: public interest archives for platform accountability. Information, Communication & Society, 27(13), 2343–2365. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2352624

Summary

The Palantir Files is a public interest research project and digital archive developed by Andrew Iliadis and Amelia Acker to promote platform accountability by documenting the operations of Palantir Technologies, a powerful and secretive data integration firm. Using thousands of publicly sourced documents—such as contracts, FOIA records, court filings, patents, and press releases—the project creates a comprehensive, searchable archive at palantirfiles.org. It serves as a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public to better understand how Palantir’s technologies are utilized across various sectors, including policing, healthcare, and immigration, and to support critical research on surveillance, metadata, and data governance in public services.

People

Dr. Andrew Iliadis is an Associate Professor at Temple University in the Department of Media Studies and Production. He is the author of the forthcoming Autonomous Defense: How Tech Companies are Crafting and Cashing in on the Future of Warfare (2025) and Semantic Media: Mapping Meaning on the Internet (Polity, 2022), co-editor of Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles (MIT Press, 2020), and co-translator of Cybernetics and the Origin of Information (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). His articles have appeared in numerous digital media journals.

Dr. Amelia Acker is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Critical Data Studies Lab. She is the author of the forthcoming Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT Press, 2025). Her research has been funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the ACM History and Archiving Fellowship. She has worked as an archivist and librarian in Los Angeles. When at home in Austin, you can find her biking, bouldering, or swimming around town.

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Files

Submit

If you would like to submit material to the archive, contact [email protected]