Why I’m protesting against the Palantir contract: a mother’s perspective on raising her son in Poland

I moved to Poland from London with my Polish husband, and we are raising our two-year-old son here. My son will grow up and live his entire life within the digital infrastructure that the government is building today. The fact that I was not born in Poland does not mean I don’t care about its future, as a mother, I have an obligation to fight for my son’s rights as a Polish citizen. Recently, I saw that the Polish Ministry of National Defence has signed a Letter of Intent with the American analytics company Palantir Technologies. Having lived through what happened in the United Kingdom when our government signed similar agreements, I believe that Polish people deserve to know what happens when public systems are handed over to a foreign defence contractor. Among the company’s founding investors was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. In London, I was part of a campaign group fighting against Palantir’s contract with our National Health Service (NHS). Under that agreement, the US defence contractor gained deep access to NHS data systems, including mental health records, reproductive health data, and medication history. Heavily redacted contracts Over 100 pages of the contract remain heavily redacted and hidden from the public. Because Palantir is an American corporation, citizens cannot easily hold them to account or use basic data access requests in the way they could with an EU-based company. In the UK, two parliamentary committees and the British Medical Association are calling on the government to exit the contract before the break clause in 2027. Poland is not the first European country Palantir has approached, but other allied nations have already drawn the line. In Switzerland, the Swiss armed forces rejected Palantir’s offers nine times. The military’s conclusion was that it was technically impossible to guarantee that sensitive national data would not reach American intelligence services. When a Swiss investigative outlet reported on this, Palantir sued them and lost on 22 of 23 counts. In Germany, the Bundeswehr explicitly excluded Palantir from a military cloud procurement on grounds of data sovereignty, with senior military officials stating that granting external industry employees’ access to the national database was completely unacceptable. Poland is now preparing to deepen its cooperation with a company that the Swiss and German militaries both rejected on security and sovereignty grounds. It is our children who will have to face the long-term consequences of today’s decisions. I have seen what happens when people in the United Kingdom did not ask questions until it was too late, and I cannot stay silent and watch exactly the same thing happen in Poland. If you care about data sovereignty, public transparency, and protecting the next generation, join us at the public protest against Palantir’s contracts in Poland, organised by Nasze Dane, on 8 November at Plac Konstytucji in Warsaw at 3pm.