Everything indicates that the current technological and political landscape in Argentine is aligning with global trends of digital control and massive data processing. In this context, our country could become an experimental territory for the implementation of predictive tools that, under the more restrictive institutional conditions of other states, would find little to no margin for application. Indeed, the Executive Branch’s recent proposal to create a “social digital twin” bears a direct correlation to developments by Palantir—a corporation founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp with initial funding from the CIA—and even the name itself corresponds to one of the company’s products.

Thiel’s active presence in the country (he purchased a house in Buenos Aires, is looking for a school for his children, and even participated in a chess tournament at a local club), alongside his successive audiences with top political and economic authorities (including President Javier Milei and Economy Minister Luis Caputo, among others), suggests the beginning of commercial negotiations aimed at unifying and transferring the public administration’s information assets to private management platforms specializing in profiling and social control.

Palantir and the Risks of State Micro-Targeting

Palantir is a company that develops artificial intelligence software to integrate, analyze, and visualize massive amounts of data. Specifically, it searches for patterns to build inferences used to map scenarios and project behaviors. By transversally unifying databases that have traditionally been compartmentalized within the State (such as Anses, AFIP, Inmigration, Health, etc.), these systems facilitate the design of micro-targeting operations for economic and social control.

Through this profiling, the software acquires the ability to cross-reference information that could be used to justify a “surgical,” person-by-person stripping of basic benefits from vulnerable individuals. For instance, if migration records detect that an elderly citizen traveled abroad sharing a vehicle with his family, the system can infer that they possess an economic support network and automatically proceed to cut his subsidies or free access to medications. Similarly, the unification of highly complex medical records—such as registries of oncological, mental health, or HIV patients—could justify commercial decisions that infringe upon the rights of these communities. In the hands of the private sector, this information is economically valuable because it allows for the forecasting of risk levels. Health insurance companies thus gain the capacity to deny affiliation or treatment to citizens pre-classified as high-cost financial liabilities.

This type of logic is by no means a theoretical hypothesis; it is starkly reflected in the company’s global track record and in similar tools implemented in other countries:

• Automated Surveillance and Deportation: In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has utilized Palantir platforms such as FALCON, Investigative Case Management (ICM), and the recent ImmigrationOS. These systems extract data from federal agencies, driver’s licenses, and cell phone towers to build complex digital profiles of immigrants and plan mass raids in real time.
• Predictive Policing: In various American cities and police agencies, Palantir Gotham software has been used to merge criminal records, biometric databases, and license plate tracking, generating automated “threat scores” that exacerbate bias and persecution in marginalized neighborhoods.
• Healthcare Centralization and Coverage Denial: In the United Kingdom, awarding the National Health Service’s (NHS) Federated Data Platform (FDP) to Palantir has sparked massive medical and civil protests over the risk that confidential clinical histories could be accessed by security agencies or diverted to the corporate insurance sector. Concurrently, in the commercial sector, Palantir’s artificial intelligence is contracted by major global insurers to structure millions of medical claims and automatically optimize the denial or reduction of payouts to policyholders under corporate efficiency criteria.

The Case of the Netherlands: A Fierce Defense of Data Sovereignty

The Netherlands has consolidated its position as a key player in defending the right to privacy and has set a crucial precedent against the indiscriminate use of its citizens’ data. The first relevant milestone began to take shape in 2018, when a coalition of civil rights activists took the SyRI (System Risk Indication) system to court. This mechanism utilized an artificial intelligence algorithm that cross-referenced massive databases from various state agencies to opaquely predict and profile which citizens in low-income neighborhoods were at a higher risk of committing welfare fraud. Strong civil resistance culminated in February 2020 with a landmark court ruling that banned the use of SyRI, declaring it illegal for violating the right to privacy enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In continuity with this strict protection policy, in May 2026, the Dutch government prohibited the sale of the local technology firm Solvinity Group to the U.S. company Kyndryl. Solvinity operates the infrastructure for the DigiD platform (a digital identity system) used by 18 million citizens to manage tax and medical records. Authorities blocked the acquisition to prevent sensitive data of its population from falling under the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. CLOUD Act, which empowers American agencies to seize information stored by firms based in their country. In doing so, the government prioritized national security and the data sovereignty of its citizens over foreign corporations.

Geopolitical Context and the Crisis of Consensus

This approach to technology is framed within a profound crisis of liberal democracies and the Western bloc as a whole, wherein large corporations openly express their rejection of liberal-democratic systems. Palantir’s corporate manifesto explicitly posits that democracy is in decline, suggesting its replacement by technocracies based on advanced algorithmic systems that validate the exclusion or subordination of broad sectors of the population.

On a social level, this phenomenon limits public deliberation through tons of disinformation, altered data, and the coordinated actions of troll farms. This dynamic generates such acute levels of alienation among citizens that technological disconnection itself is beginning to be seen as an act of resistance. Faced with this paradigm—which destroys the productive capacity of developing countries and pushes the majority toward a total precariat, first by expelling them from formal employment, and then by precaritizing them in ultra-alienating tasks such as service platform gigs —alternative visions coexist.

The BRICS bloc, driven by technological powers like India, Brazil, and China, promotes strategic guidelines aimed at preserving digital sovereignty and the right to development, conceiving advanced automation as a complement to human labor and a catalyst for the redistribution of welfare. Unfortunately, local public administration has opted to firmly align itself with the predatory and extractivist view of technology.

The Argentine Legal Framework as a Citizen’s Trench

Despite the current climate of inaction by the enforcement authorities of personal data protection laws, Argentine legal and constitutional doctrine offers safeguarding mechanisms. A fundamental principle upheld by our organization stipulates that any information inferred about an individual through algorithmic deductions must fall strictly under the protective regime of the aforementioned personal data law.

Furthermore, this stance is complemented by a decisive jurisprudential backing from the Supreme Court of Justice’s ruling in the case “Torres Abad v. Jefatura de Gabinete de Ministros”. This April 2026 ruling establishes the unconstitutionality of articles that empowered the State to collect data without consent and to exchange data among public offices. Thus, it set a categorical limit on the State’s discretionary use of citizens’ information. Although this ruling arrived nearly ten years after the abuses were initially committed, it functions today as a firm precedent to activate preventive tools. The articulation of urgent legal coalitions is critical: the transfer of public information assets to private corporations constitutes an act that, due to its technical and cross-border nature, would be absolutely irreversible once finalized.

The implementation of a “social digital twin” in Argentina does not represent a mere modernization of bureaucratic management, but rather the adoption of a corporate-rooted mass surveillance model that dissolves the boundaries of basic privacy. By opening its doors to corporations designed for state intelligence and the systematic dismantling of rights, the State abdicates its protective role to transform into an automated auditor of its own citizens’ vulnerability. Faced with an algorithm programmed for exclusion and precaritization, the defense of the constitutional framework, preventive litigation by civil society, and the critical interrogation of technology become indispensable conditions to prevent the population’s most intimate assets from being irreversibly confiscated in favor of a global technocracy.