Funding Matters – a statement about the corporate funding of academic conferences
▻https://fundingmatters.tech
As privacy scholars and advocates concerned with human rights, we write to express our dismay with the decision to have Palantir as a platinum sponsor for the Amsterdam Privacy Conference (APC).
Privacy is one of the central challenges of our time and a pressing topic in today’s discussions on platforms, algorithms and policy making. The APC is a powerful forum for academics and advocates from around the world to move the field of privacy research forward. The conference is an important venue for privacy scholars from many different disciplines. The presence of Palantir as a sponsor of this conference legitimizes the company’s practices and gives it the opportunity to position itself as part of the agenda. This is deeply problematic and extremely regrettable.
Palantir’s business model is based on a particular form of surveillance capitalism that targets marginalized communities and accelerates the use of discriminatory technologies such as predictive policing, for which the company has already been heavily criticized [1, 2]. Among Palantir’s public clients are police agencies and defense departments from all over the world. In the last year, Palantir has helped the Trump administration to find and deport asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants and refugees, raising serious concerns about wide-scale human rights violations [3]. While the company is largely secretive about its operations, it reportedly collaborated with Cambridge Analytica [4, 5], hedge funds, banks and financial service firms [6].
Despite criticism over Palantir’s sponsorship since the conference’s 2015 edition, APC’s sponsorship strategy has not changed. This stance has consequences: it contributes to the marginalization and exclusion of scholars that otherwise would have participated and enriched the conversation at these events. Hence, it also impacts APC’s ability to nurture public debate on privacy.
Palantir has also surfaced as a sponsor at a range of other prominent privacy and technology policy events. Due to similar concerns, some of these conferences have discontinued Palantir sponsorship, an example that we hope to see replicated. Given the political, economic and societal implications of privacy today, the funding strategies of our conferences matter more than ever. However complicated the process may be, it is time to develop sponsorship criteria and guidelines that ensure academic independence and proper consideration of human rights.
We therefore call for:
The discontinuation of Palantir’s sponsorship of the Amsterdam Privacy Conference,
Organizers and participants alike to engage in an action-oriented discussion on corporate funding of academic events,
The development of rigorous criteria and guidelines for corporate sponsorship, for example, based on Human Rights Impact Assessments.