People seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted.
Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
Our whole tech stack is foreign owned and built. Everything from the CPU to the operating system and more. We live in a globalised system and there's no undoing that. The very idea of "nation" is being challenged.
To me the NHS is a hang-over from the 20th century, out of date and struggling to keep up. A new system of health care needs to take over. I'm not smart enough to know what that is, but I hope it happens soon.
Democratic governments should not provide health care.
Politicians quickly learn to use government services/"rights" as a means of dividing and controlling the population. Instead of thinking about the survival of the nation, people focus on personal survival (e.g., should I vote to live another three years or help pay for a new weapon system?). To provide healthcare is akin to weighing the nations' pancreas on a balance scale against, for example, the Navy. What kind of a country is that? (Ans. "Almost every developed nation today!-(")
I believe the term for this is "incommensurability". Whilst money seems to make everything "commensurable" at first glance, it is a mistake to extend the application of money in this manner to government-provided healthcare.
> “Democratic governments should not provide health care.”
I don’t know about this, but I’m positive employers should not provide health insurance.
Companies don’t have the right incentives to be controlling your healthcare plan, when you leave the company you don’t have a plan (unless you can afford COBRA), you might not even be eligible for health insurance from your company because of company-policy to not cover non-manager level or part-time——are they too not deserving of healthcare insurance? Employers coverage is good for some because incentives align, but it should not be the standard.
But this is actually not what happens and for the most part democratic governments that do provide health care are the ones with the best health outcomes worldwide, so what point are you trying to make?
>>Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.
It's all we do. Sell our country down the river for the benefit of a few wankers.
I signed up to the link in the original post, but don't have that much hope. We'll sell our grandma if it'll mean we get a 50p voucher or save 2 more minutes of our day.
I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
It’s not going to happen via politics. It has to come by being creative from the outside in.
>I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
Let me guess, its a new Web Framework isn't it? :P
I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.
I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
I don’t believe in the communism vs capitalist debate. The latter has furthered progress so clearly there are benefits to be had. But yet the dream of the former continues on.
Someone who is more open to a “take the best of what exists” is what is needed.
I think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.
It’s not impossible. The UK has a rich history of tech innovation but it’s long since been eclipsed by Silicon Valley and its funding (which the UK can only dream of).
But the UK government's GDS team is a fantastic example of doing tech right in government. I can see an expanded government involvement in tech for bodies like the NHS that is a clear alternative to the Silicon Valley model. The salaries would never reach US levels but could still afford a very comfortable life.
Problem is that it would require the government to spend money on itself and its employees, which successive governments are loathe to do because the press will punish them for it every time.
In many ways the UK is a tragic country: top tier talent in many areas, hamstrung by political, management, financial, and media culture rooted in the 19th century, and wholly colonised by offshore owners and foreign powers.
Many of the country's assets and infrastructure are now literally owned abroad, and run for the benefit of foreign owners.
You regularly get outbreaks of talent like GDS, and they regularly get sidelined/eaten/shut down if they're not aligned with corporate ownership.
Yes, I also think ossified social structures have a lot to do with it. You work up the chain of management and eventually you find the son of the Earl of Tossingham, who turns out to be completely ineffectual.
The US has avoided that fate up until this point but when I look at Larry Ellison’s son buying Paramount with dad’s money, the Trump juniors cashing in on their dads name (and to your point, all of them happily taking investment from the Saudis) I do have a sense of history repeating itself.
Nah, the US has always had the same problem except without titles. Robert F Kennedy Jr. is the same phenomenon. Why is the Earl or RFK in charge? Because of the name. That's what the Roark family in the Sin City stories is about, this happens in major US cities just like anywhere else.
It's worse if it's literally part of the design of the country's civil fabric, e.g. Saudi Arabia or indeed Britain's Royal Family but while Charlie and a handful of his family have that sort of connection a lot of those random Earls and other minor titles are just inherited power, same as a Kennedy or a Roark. And it's barely a century since Britain last had to do the "hard" (it's about an hour of parliament's time) work of just crossing out names on these lists (last century it was because some of our uh, nobles, were actually born and lived in Germany, and had thus become our Enemy in World War I)
To my mind, a big problem is that until extremely recently Britain's two major political parties both agreed on the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea that doing work is a moral necessity for people. There are a lot of scenarios where that breaks down, but neither Labour (because um, clue is in the name) nor the Tories could stomach the idea that maybe working isn't itself a valuable end. We are well past the point where it's mechanically necessary to employ everybody, and we may be approaching the point where doing so is actively harmful, a political party who can't even imagine that is a bad fit.
We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.
My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.
Actually yes, that would be an ideal intervention of state into computing infrastructure.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
The UK also needs better distribution of data centers. Ireland is off the table for some services, like police etc. So all data ends up in London, and you need to distribute between AWS and Azure, but you don't get the regional distribution.
So, yea, build some data centers in Scotland and somewhere in the midlands, setup some good cloud services, starting with the basics - Compute, DB, and storage.
I mean, you can work for government, it's excellent (if underpaid) work. But they absolutely don't have the long term scale, focus, or investment to build something like Databricks/Foundry over several decades.
Which, they could - in fact, government (specifically meaning Civil Service) is the ideal environment in which to manage long-term scale, focus, and investment - it's just that private (in fact multinational) interests have weaponized politics against "government", which in practice means "good governance".
The UK absolutely, categorically has the talent to build something like AWS. They should do this, but I feel like the government doesn't have the talent to fund and execute on a project like this.
Choice would be a fine thing ... I understand there is a move in some European countries towards more open source. How successful that'll be is debatable, but at least they're trying ffs.
But they've been trying for fourty years and not got very far. You can argue government should all be running Linux all you want, but if you want to deliver services, sometimes it's okay to just buy something off the shelf that works.
The irony of course being that the "off-the-shelf" something in fact needs to be adapted to an ever-shifting set of requirements, and then does not "work".
You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.
Yet the big problem is of course for those being “principled” about this subject are not serious themselves as some either work there and profit from it, continue to use their products including LLMs or will concede to using them due to social inertia.
The only time this is taken seriously is when all these contracts are scrapped. (They won’t be.)
Companies that submit bids for contracts get contracts. You would be surprised at the diversity of size and scale of companies which service defense contracts in particular - very small companies can end up in big supply chains because they're the ones who turn up to make the part.
As a worker in one of the companies above, I can tell you that we aren’t willing to do just “whatever” to win contracts. We have real responsible AI reviews etc. We would not just hand over data to the US government. It doesn’t seem that way at Palantir.
But the issue is, and I am not someone saying we should or can throw everything out, that if the US gov demands it, you have to hand over the data right? If your HQ is in the US? Palantir, for me, is worse because of what they are and their communications as you say, but all of these, when compelled by the courts, have to hand over right?
As cliche is it to cry whataboutism, this clearly is. Incrementalism is better than nothing. Sanctimony is FUD. If even one company is suffers at least it’ll serve as a warning to the others.
Why stop there? You should also boycott the investment firms behind these tech companies, like Y Combinator, and their Internet forums like Hacker News.
They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
I keep hearing about these Palantir magic abilities but I have not seen any positive example where Palantir made an actually actionable predictions that are not common sense
From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
Unless Palantir has code that overrides US laws (the US CLOUD act specifically), they are a US company and there is zero protection from anyone in the US that has (secret or not) subpoena power. Yes, secret subpoena power exists. That includes the NSA, Congress, police, investigative judges, US youth services (yes, really), state legislatures of all states, including some territories, the White House and thus Trump, the list goes on and on and on and on.
Including organizations like NSA and CIA that have already shown they use these powers, classify everything secret, while lying about it even to the US Congress.
FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).
Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.
If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
Not to the public, but University hospitals often have researchers trudging through their data. Junior doctors often audit patient data. Palantir isn't the first organisation to look at patient data.
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
This comment isn’t as much of an exaggeration as it seems, at least regarding engineering. At a previous job, I was tasked with helping a product line achieve certification to a government standard. The public facing government contact I interacted with was just a middle man with the consultancy, ICF, who actually developed and maintained the standards, to government specifications. Also, those government specifications had significant input from industry.
The "government does nothing for itseld" thing..... I am not sure thats true. Pretty sure the government is the single biggest employer in the country a d I dont think that even counts contractors
Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.
Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that:
1. protects patient privacy
2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH)
3. allows providers to use data to support their operations
4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
I think you misread it a bit. On the bioinformatics point, I was addressing some text in the link. I don’t mean to belittle people that work in healthcare, just suspicious how Palantir secured contracts.
Yeah, ontology is a key word. Its like the best concepts from things like Informatica and Pachyderm and Snowflake, structured in a semi-sane data security model and certified with all the fedramp whatnot you need to make cloud saas work for enterprise.
Yeah, it is dead boring until you hit the real world of trying to make a data request from an IRB which doesn't talk to the IT folks who don't really know the ins and outs of the data they steward but have their own forms and approvals and bespoke deidentification process, . . . once your org is in that state then Foundry starts looking really good. Taking months to sort out getting a csv into your free agnostic workflow tools wasn't fine before, but c19 really made the tool's strengths clear and people want to retain that increased velocity.
Like the iPod, if you are Cdr Taco it is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." If you are a normal person struggling with meaningful data in the enterprise and see all the things packaged together tidily, then iPod economics happen.
Its possible I was too dismissive. This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I think I'm jaded/cynical because there is an endless graveyard of bad software tools in this world.
> This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap?
I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely.
It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.
I won't comment on Palantir themselves, I doubt I could add anything there, but I think there is a glaring pattern to be observed there. Companies really are not people, if people don't want them, they can cease to exist. If the UK for example is really able to say no to Palantir, can they do it countrywide?
Fines aside (let's be real, they're just taxes at this point since no company goes bankrupt from fines these days), what company is facing meaningful consequence for harming society?
Vote with dollars? Ok...but back to my pessimism earlier, I guess I don't need to vote at the ballot then right? Let's just vote with our wallets instead?
If Palantir really is so evil (and I'm not saying that, I don't know enough , although I've probably used their stuff more than most), at minimum, tell me what sort of a vote will lead to their extinction. if they broke the law, tell me who I can vote for to imprison the law breakers. If they didn't break the law because one didn't exist to prohibit their actions to begin with, then who will pass the laws required so I can vote for them? Why are we not talking about whatever practice Palantir is in the habit of doing, and how to criminalize that? Maybe we can't in the US, but this is Europe, I would hope they'd have better luck.
This sort of thinking and action-taking doesn't seem to exist here in the US. I don't think we're able to function that way anymore.
To friends in Europe and elsewhere: Take heed and be warned. Being able to organize and resist companies and laws, that's something you should fight with all your strength over.
But looking at this site, it isn't very convincing. I know of more serious accusations against Palantir that aren't listed there. Enabling mass deportations and gaza, yeah.. that's Microsoft, Google and Cisco as well. Their CEO, yeah.. Elon says a lot worse things about a lot more things, are his satellites banned in the UK? at least is the UK gov banned from using them? He's been caught aiding Russia with his sats a couple of times now.
My observation is that a more holistic approach and measures are needed. A glaring lack of consequences over all.
Palantir indeed has a lot of clients, but governments - and in particular, US federal agencies - are still the biggest and most lucrative customers. Nor is Palantir blind to what those customers are using the tech for - indeed, their whole point is "deploying" people to customer's premises so that they can work hands on. So when they do that for the ICE contract, say, they know full well what they are optimizing - proudly so. It's way more close and personal than what most of the big tech firms do (although you did list some exceptions).
But no, it's not illegal to provide panopticon-as-a-service to authoritarian governments, unfortunately. Especially not when you ask said governments.
As to what you can do to change this, I honestly don't know, and I say this as someone who resigned from NVIDIA recently because of this: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp... - but there's no shortage of people willing to work on this stuff. And in US at least I feel big tech enmeshed with the feds have such a strong lobby, neither major party is going to do anything useful about it in terms of passing laws making the business model itself illegal.
I don't think I want anyone quitting their jobs over this. Is democracy working or not? Let's make it illegal then. If people who vote are just not aware of this, then there needs to be a more organized awareness campaign, how can we help with that?
I don't think all this "lone hero" b.s. by engineers is useful. I don't need someone martyring their careers.
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.
All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.
Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
> Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
There isn't a single reason or idea in your previous two paragraphs. Instead it seems to be the worst of cynicism designed to encourage people to give up on reasoning and ideas.
Russian drones/war machines with his satlinks have been found, they would have needed to fly with an uplink from deep within russia from what I understand, meaning his sats were providing service there, and chances are he supplied the terminals.
For all practical purposes this already exists and that's because practically speaking it has to. Obviously a health system can't deploy infinity money to save the life of every person who is sick.
Well yeah, US healthcare system is already pretty close to just being an AI kill chain as is. Maybe they could make some cool ads about how they're ruthlessly optimizing that as well, with a little more of a mask off kind of sociopathic approach that they do.
Oh that's great! How did I not know about zapper?! (Usually on desktop I remove annoying things in inspector by just deleting the HTML element manually, but on mobile I usually just closed the site. Glad to have a nice solution now!)
I can't say I understand the Palantir hate. Isn't it just a database analytics SaaS? Why not hate Google as well because government employees who do things you don't like use Google? Is the Palantir hate just manufactured pointless rage or is there an actual reason behind it?
Palantir have the means and at least in the U. S. the call to compile a database combining personal data over many (public) agencies, making a comprehensive surveillance of a population possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530212437/https://www.nytim...
Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)
You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine
Perhaps it would be preferable at least to not mix civilian health data or regular business data, with mass surveillance data, and with military industrial complex and kill chain data. It would make sense to have an interest in keeping different kinds of personal data in separate places and not have it thrown around companies with quite different interests or collected together within some company that's involved in quite different industries. So why does it not make sense to apologists of this company?
It doesn't matter whether they do or not, the desire to keep separate things separate could be there as is. It might as well not be any of that but just about the kinds of things some companies are involved in.
Again, kind of amusing how that immediately devolves into "are you making an accusation".
How capable it is do you think at this moment. I guess we need 30 more years for software to get better, so less than 20 thousand children dies in the Gaza genocide.
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.
Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
No it’s not. It’s totally conceivable that the (perceived) quality of targeting data would contribute to the decision of whether to run a mission at all, and if so how extensively.
The companies involved definitely want you to think that part of their noble goal is reducing civilian casualties. As far as I can see, though, that is pure propaganda.
i am not saying that is the case here, all i am saying is that your argument would apply to any technology that lets you better differentiate/target enemies vs. civilians, which suggests to me it is overbroad.
You are reading perhaps more generality than I intended. To be clear, I am talking about the present greater-Anglo-American military-industrial complex, driven by present ideologies, in which the distinction between “enemy” and “civilian” itself is extremely debatable.
And that the people who stand to benefit the most from another war might want to filter/target that data in a way to make that more probable?
I mean, I know it's a stretch. Especially with how benevolent our current class of billionaires are. But just imagine a guy who thinks money is more important than anything else. I know... another stretch. lol.
> > Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
You're not actually suggesting that the company providing the data isn't at all part of that process, are you?
Can you, for a second, imagine a company collecting/forwarding only data that's beneficial to it's core objective? Especially one whose led by a guy who has quite literally benefits off of a war????
I am 100% sure you have absolutely no idea what Palantir actually do, and I suggest you go actually read about it. There's plenty of resources out there which will explain in considerable detail what the product is, what the services are, how the services get provided, and the benefits (for example one of Palantir's premier operations is "forward deployed engineers" - which is super-handy for organizations which work in government because it means they come to you and do the installs and setup, but don't keep or even have access to any of the data - the relationship is between you and the specific employees - who in turn need to have Federal clearances - and not Palantir corporate).
This arrangement is extremely conventional, but most company's hate doing it and so don't unless they're operating with the expertise to manage those types of orgs (which is usually only profitable if you have a unique advantage or specialize in seeking a lot of contracts and then navigate the data handling rules to realize - hopefully - some synergies).
I don't like Thiel, but his detractors are also very obviously ignorant as to how any of the Federal government normally works.
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.
> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.
Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure?
> One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function?
> With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health.
This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?
I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
Peter Thiel says a lot of high and mighty things but has made pretty much all his money in mundane software, mostly ads. So if it offers any solace, I doubt his principles will get in the way of him making money.
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.
The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
Yes. Billionaires with an authoritarian agenda will cost their businesses and their shareholders billions of dollars in pursuit of ideological goals. Throw a few fascist salutes and people stop buying your cars. Was that salute rational? Is rationality even the right question?
So the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens.
Nice...
What could possibly go wrong with giving UK citizen data to ICE, NSA, CIA, Trump, Trumps friends, Trumps friends corporations, Trump's friends foreign political connections, donors to the above etc...
so on and so on to gather every single thing you've ever done on the internet, it's very dystopia like and I cannot believe that it's legal outside the US for palantir to even operate in.
Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???
Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.
> the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere.
Um. You realise the vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are owned by private citizens and organizations other than the government right? The only government owned camera I can think of within a mile of here is a traffic camera watching a river crossing. The government has about 300 cameras total in my entire city.
Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.
I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles.
Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.
I'm really confused as to why the Good Law Project thinks this is their fight.
NHS gives contract for cloud database to US cloud software company. This is not that shocking. I'm not clear what they outcome they're looking for .... Using Databricks instead and getting slightly shittier health outcomes so we can be smug we're not connected to Peter Thiel?
The Good Law Project is a left wing activist organisation, and Palantir is a conservative-aligned company.
It really is as simple as that.
If you’re wondering why these HN commenters are so passionately against Palantir, just take a cursory look through their comment history and you’ll understand.
People seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted.
Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
Our whole tech stack is foreign owned and built. Everything from the CPU to the operating system and more. We live in a globalised system and there's no undoing that. The very idea of "nation" is being challenged.
To me the NHS is a hang-over from the 20th century, out of date and struggling to keep up. A new system of health care needs to take over. I'm not smart enough to know what that is, but I hope it happens soon.
Democratic governments should not provide health care.
Politicians quickly learn to use government services/"rights" as a means of dividing and controlling the population. Instead of thinking about the survival of the nation, people focus on personal survival (e.g., should I vote to live another three years or help pay for a new weapon system?). To provide healthcare is akin to weighing the nations' pancreas on a balance scale against, for example, the Navy. What kind of a country is that? (Ans. "Almost every developed nation today!-(")
I believe the term for this is "incommensurability". Whilst money seems to make everything "commensurable" at first glance, it is a mistake to extend the application of money in this manner to government-provided healthcare.
https://healthcarereaders.com/insights/healthcare-fundamenta...
> “Democratic governments should not provide health care.”
I don’t know about this, but I’m positive employers should not provide health insurance.
Companies don’t have the right incentives to be controlling your healthcare plan, when you leave the company you don’t have a plan (unless you can afford COBRA), you might not even be eligible for health insurance from your company because of company-policy to not cover non-manager level or part-time——are they too not deserving of healthcare insurance? Employers coverage is good for some because incentives align, but it should not be the standard.
But this is actually not what happens and for the most part democratic governments that do provide health care are the ones with the best health outcomes worldwide, so what point are you trying to make?
>>Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.
You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.
It's all we do. Sell our country down the river for the benefit of a few wankers.
I signed up to the link in the original post, but don't have that much hope. We'll sell our grandma if it'll mean we get a 50p voucher or save 2 more minutes of our day.
Yes that’s exactly what I mean.
I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
It’s not going to happen via politics. It has to come by being creative from the outside in.
>I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing.
Let me guess, its a new Web Framework isn't it? :P
I’m not very confident in the strategy of immiserating most people to drive positive change. This has been a Communist talking point for a century and a half that has yet to produce positive results, despite many attempts.
I am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
I don’t believe in the communism vs capitalist debate. The latter has furthered progress so clearly there are benefits to be had. But yet the dream of the former continues on.
Someone who is more open to a “take the best of what exists” is what is needed.
Appreciate the positive sentiment.
> You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water.
Wasn’t it both England and Wales?
I think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.
> The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
That's a nice dream.
Hopefully I can reply back to you in 2 years and laugh :)
It’s not impossible. The UK has a rich history of tech innovation but it’s long since been eclipsed by Silicon Valley and its funding (which the UK can only dream of).
But the UK government's GDS team is a fantastic example of doing tech right in government. I can see an expanded government involvement in tech for bodies like the NHS that is a clear alternative to the Silicon Valley model. The salaries would never reach US levels but could still afford a very comfortable life.
Problem is that it would require the government to spend money on itself and its employees, which successive governments are loathe to do because the press will punish them for it every time.
In many ways the UK is a tragic country: top tier talent in many areas, hamstrung by political, management, financial, and media culture rooted in the 19th century, and wholly colonised by offshore owners and foreign powers.
Many of the country's assets and infrastructure are now literally owned abroad, and run for the benefit of foreign owners.
You regularly get outbreaks of talent like GDS, and they regularly get sidelined/eaten/shut down if they're not aligned with corporate ownership.
Yes, I also think ossified social structures have a lot to do with it. You work up the chain of management and eventually you find the son of the Earl of Tossingham, who turns out to be completely ineffectual.
The US has avoided that fate up until this point but when I look at Larry Ellison’s son buying Paramount with dad’s money, the Trump juniors cashing in on their dads name (and to your point, all of them happily taking investment from the Saudis) I do have a sense of history repeating itself.
Nah, the US has always had the same problem except without titles. Robert F Kennedy Jr. is the same phenomenon. Why is the Earl or RFK in charge? Because of the name. That's what the Roark family in the Sin City stories is about, this happens in major US cities just like anywhere else.
It's worse if it's literally part of the design of the country's civil fabric, e.g. Saudi Arabia or indeed Britain's Royal Family but while Charlie and a handful of his family have that sort of connection a lot of those random Earls and other minor titles are just inherited power, same as a Kennedy or a Roark. And it's barely a century since Britain last had to do the "hard" (it's about an hour of parliament's time) work of just crossing out names on these lists (last century it was because some of our uh, nobles, were actually born and lived in Germany, and had thus become our Enemy in World War I)
To my mind, a big problem is that until extremely recently Britain's two major political parties both agreed on the Protestant Work Ethic, the idea that doing work is a moral necessity for people. There are a lot of scenarios where that breaks down, but neither Labour (because um, clue is in the name) nor the Tories could stomach the idea that maybe working isn't itself a valuable end. We are well past the point where it's mechanically necessary to employ everybody, and we may be approaching the point where doing so is actively harmful, a political party who can't even imagine that is a bad fit.
We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.
My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
if they have to get re-elected every 5 years, they won't look any further.
The answer is not to give them unmitigated power for as long as they want.
I didn't say I had a better idea.
This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.
But Palantir is a software company. Do you feel similarly about the NHS using AWS/Azure/GCP? Do we want it all on some on prem homemade stack?
Actually yes, that would be an ideal intervention of state into computing infrastructure.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
The UK also needs better distribution of data centers. Ireland is off the table for some services, like police etc. So all data ends up in London, and you need to distribute between AWS and Azure, but you don't get the regional distribution.
So, yea, build some data centers in Scotland and somewhere in the midlands, setup some good cloud services, starting with the basics - Compute, DB, and storage.
I mean, you can work for government, it's excellent (if underpaid) work. But they absolutely don't have the long term scale, focus, or investment to build something like Databricks/Foundry over several decades.
Which, they could - in fact, government (specifically meaning Civil Service) is the ideal environment in which to manage long-term scale, focus, and investment - it's just that private (in fact multinational) interests have weaponized politics against "government", which in practice means "good governance".
The UK absolutely, categorically has the talent to build something like AWS. They should do this, but I feel like the government doesn't have the talent to fund and execute on a project like this.
Yes. I do feel similarly.
Choice would be a fine thing ... I understand there is a move in some European countries towards more open source. How successful that'll be is debatable, but at least they're trying ffs.
But they've been trying for fourty years and not got very far. You can argue government should all be running Linux all you want, but if you want to deliver services, sometimes it's okay to just buy something off the shelf that works.
The irony of course being that the "off-the-shelf" something in fact needs to be adapted to an ever-shifting set of requirements, and then does not "work".
Everyone should say no to palantir anywhere, especially outside the US.
Palantir is inside Coles supermarkets in Australia. I've stopped going to Coles because of that.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
Wow the business jargon is dense in this one. What a pile of garbage.
I assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.
Thanks, fixed.
And inside the US too!
You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.
Yet the big problem is of course for those being “principled” about this subject are not serious themselves as some either work there and profit from it, continue to use their products including LLMs or will concede to using them due to social inertia.
The only time this is taken seriously is when all these contracts are scrapped. (They won’t be.)
I think the difference is that Palantir is significantly more focused on federal contracts, particularly those related to defense/surveillance.
Large tech companies are defense contractors now.
Is there a time they weren’t?
Google got their first DoD contract in 2003 from DARPA.
Facebook was Life Log, Oracle was Project Oracle. None of the household names in tech are playing straight.
What does “Playing straight” mean?
There doesn’t exist a serious technology company ever in the history of technology that didn’t support the state they incorporated in.
WDYM "now"? Companies that get large enough get contracts. Even apple sold power macs iphones and ipads to us mil.
I'm throwing out my iPhone and moving to Tibet.
China occupied Tibet?
Logical choice if you hate America and oppose the idea of defending it.
Companies that submit bids for contracts get contracts. You would be surprised at the diversity of size and scale of companies which service defense contracts in particular - very small companies can end up in big supply chains because they're the ones who turn up to make the part.
Of course that's the goal, but stopping new contract is 1 step toward the goal my friend, got to stop whining and take baby step.
You are saying stopping new coal mine means that everyone need to stop heating now and freeze to death this winter.
Don't let the best be the enemy of the good.
Absolutely. We should not contract any of these companies and use British companies instead.
I'm sure AMSTRAD could knock up a few data centres for a couple o quid
As a worker in one of the companies above, I can tell you that we aren’t willing to do just “whatever” to win contracts. We have real responsible AI reviews etc. We would not just hand over data to the US government. It doesn’t seem that way at Palantir.
But the issue is, and I am not someone saying we should or can throw everything out, that if the US gov demands it, you have to hand over the data right? If your HQ is in the US? Palantir, for me, is worse because of what they are and their communications as you say, but all of these, when compelled by the courts, have to hand over right?
best not to do business with any foreign country then. neo-isolationism becomes global and all it took was a second Trump term.
"all it took was a total loss of international confidence"
As cliche is it to cry whataboutism, this clearly is. Incrementalism is better than nothing. Sanctimony is FUD. If even one company is suffers at least it’ll serve as a warning to the others.
Why stop there? You should also boycott the investment firms behind these tech companies, like Y Combinator, and their Internet forums like Hacker News.
When one domino falls, it will cause many to fall at once
So we can’t take it seriously until the problem is already solved?
I think the worry regarding Palantir is that it is explicitly and openly fascist rather than just doing fascism on the side
Why?
We don’t know who else is watching.
Why?
Surveillance Capitalism
They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
I keep hearing about these Palantir magic abilities but I have not seen any positive example where Palantir made an actually actionable predictions that are not common sense
My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.
Make the data public if you want to see progress
From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
Unless Palantir has code that overrides US laws (the US CLOUD act specifically), they are a US company and there is zero protection from anyone in the US that has (secret or not) subpoena power. Yes, secret subpoena power exists. That includes the NSA, Congress, police, investigative judges, US youth services (yes, really), state legislatures of all states, including some territories, the White House and thus Trump, the list goes on and on and on and on.
Including organizations like NSA and CIA that have already shown they use these powers, classify everything secret, while lying about it even to the US Congress.
FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).
Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.
Your caveats of "rarely" and "usually" undermine the "anything" you use.
The edit is naive to an extent that makes one wonder if you are writing in good faith.
We use Microsoft Windows, HP, Dell, AWS and Chinese made hardware... All foreign designed and built tech stack.
But for some reason Palantir is the bad one?
This is not a good faith argument
If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
I trust Palantir about the same as I trust the Chinese government with my health data.
Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
Not to the public, but University hospitals often have researchers trudging through their data. Junior doctors often audit patient data. Palantir isn't the first organisation to look at patient data.
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
This comment isn’t as much of an exaggeration as it seems, at least regarding engineering. At a previous job, I was tasked with helping a product line achieve certification to a government standard. The public facing government contact I interacted with was just a middle man with the consultancy, ICF, who actually developed and maintained the standards, to government specifications. Also, those government specifications had significant input from industry.
The "government does nothing for itseld" thing..... I am not sure thats true. Pretty sure the government is the single biggest employer in the country a d I dont think that even counts contractors
Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.
> My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.
Because they pay better.
Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?
Palantir provide the software stack, they don't do the research.
Friend of a friend was working on a Palantir NHS integration a few years before the pandemic, so I'm pretty sure this ship has sailed.
So what are they using this software for, what's the proposed alternative, and what makes that alternative work better for their use case?
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.
Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that: 1. protects patient privacy 2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH) 3. allows providers to use data to support their operations 4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency
This Foundry demo impressed me at the time but its a bit dated now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms
Actual data analyst from a hospital talking about what the platform achieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps47Azr2Jz0
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
They are currently trying to screw us for a 14% year on year increase (over 4 years)
and screwing us for licenses to run apps in "production"
> requires a huge amount of integration work
Oh no!..
Data integration is literally Palantir's business.
That second video was fascinating, thanks for posting.
It's totally reasonable to be skeptical of palantir without knowing the exact product in question, given their record.
Healthcare systems often use Foundry for organizing data. It's a complex problem and Foundry has a good toolset for the job.
https://www.palantir.com/offerings/health/
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
I think you misread it a bit. On the bioinformatics point, I was addressing some text in the link. I don’t mean to belittle people that work in healthcare, just suspicious how Palantir secured contracts.
Yeah, ontology is a key word. Its like the best concepts from things like Informatica and Pachyderm and Snowflake, structured in a semi-sane data security model and certified with all the fedramp whatnot you need to make cloud saas work for enterprise.
Yeah, it is dead boring until you hit the real world of trying to make a data request from an IRB which doesn't talk to the IT folks who don't really know the ins and outs of the data they steward but have their own forms and approvals and bespoke deidentification process, . . . once your org is in that state then Foundry starts looking really good. Taking months to sort out getting a csv into your free agnostic workflow tools wasn't fine before, but c19 really made the tool's strengths clear and people want to retain that increased velocity.
Like the iPod, if you are Cdr Taco it is "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." If you are a normal person struggling with meaningful data in the enterprise and see all the things packaged together tidily, then iPod economics happen.
Its possible I was too dismissive. This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap? I think I'm jaded/cynical because there is an endless graveyard of bad software tools in this world.
> This problem is hard because of the huge gap between the health/biology domain and the tech domain. Is there a reason you feel like Palantir is better equipped to close this gap?
I'm not certain that it is better equipped than any hypothetical or specifically focused system. Given any part of it, I see a lot of products that can be composed into a similar offering. That misses the point though because the problems are socio-political in nature, not technological. It is expensive, which means that if an organization adopts it, everyone from the top down better get into alignment or you will waste a lot of cash. Internal alignment like that can be achieved without spending a lot of money probably maybe, but not likely.
It is also externally aligned a little better than IBM/Oracle (saw Watson, Deloitte "data democracy" etc) as a SaaS with training and consulting.
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
Did you read the article? Adult social care dashboard not vaccine data. Mozaic just handled migration and is not the host.
NHs FDP (Foundry) still has the vaccine data last time I checked.
From what I can tell, it's just a data integration platform. This article seems like a smear campaign.
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.
I won't comment on Palantir themselves, I doubt I could add anything there, but I think there is a glaring pattern to be observed there. Companies really are not people, if people don't want them, they can cease to exist. If the UK for example is really able to say no to Palantir, can they do it countrywide?
Fines aside (let's be real, they're just taxes at this point since no company goes bankrupt from fines these days), what company is facing meaningful consequence for harming society?
Vote with dollars? Ok...but back to my pessimism earlier, I guess I don't need to vote at the ballot then right? Let's just vote with our wallets instead?
If Palantir really is so evil (and I'm not saying that, I don't know enough , although I've probably used their stuff more than most), at minimum, tell me what sort of a vote will lead to their extinction. if they broke the law, tell me who I can vote for to imprison the law breakers. If they didn't break the law because one didn't exist to prohibit their actions to begin with, then who will pass the laws required so I can vote for them? Why are we not talking about whatever practice Palantir is in the habit of doing, and how to criminalize that? Maybe we can't in the US, but this is Europe, I would hope they'd have better luck.
This sort of thinking and action-taking doesn't seem to exist here in the US. I don't think we're able to function that way anymore.
To friends in Europe and elsewhere: Take heed and be warned. Being able to organize and resist companies and laws, that's something you should fight with all your strength over.
But looking at this site, it isn't very convincing. I know of more serious accusations against Palantir that aren't listed there. Enabling mass deportations and gaza, yeah.. that's Microsoft, Google and Cisco as well. Their CEO, yeah.. Elon says a lot worse things about a lot more things, are his satellites banned in the UK? at least is the UK gov banned from using them? He's been caught aiding Russia with his sats a couple of times now.
My observation is that a more holistic approach and measures are needed. A glaring lack of consequences over all.
Palantir indeed has a lot of clients, but governments - and in particular, US federal agencies - are still the biggest and most lucrative customers. Nor is Palantir blind to what those customers are using the tech for - indeed, their whole point is "deploying" people to customer's premises so that they can work hands on. So when they do that for the ICE contract, say, they know full well what they are optimizing - proudly so. It's way more close and personal than what most of the big tech firms do (although you did list some exceptions).
But no, it's not illegal to provide panopticon-as-a-service to authoritarian governments, unfortunately. Especially not when you ask said governments.
As to what you can do to change this, I honestly don't know, and I say this as someone who resigned from NVIDIA recently because of this: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp... - but there's no shortage of people willing to work on this stuff. And in US at least I feel big tech enmeshed with the feds have such a strong lobby, neither major party is going to do anything useful about it in terms of passing laws making the business model itself illegal.
I don't think I want anyone quitting their jobs over this. Is democracy working or not? Let's make it illegal then. If people who vote are just not aware of this, then there needs to be a more organized awareness campaign, how can we help with that?
I don't think all this "lone hero" b.s. by engineers is useful. I don't need someone martyring their careers.
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.
All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.
Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
> Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
There isn't a single reason or idea in your previous two paragraphs. Instead it seems to be the worst of cynicism designed to encourage people to give up on reasoning and ideas.
Has he helped Russia? I know he did help Ukraine partly with Starlink and I hadn't heard much beyond that
Russian drones/war machines with his satlinks have been found, they would have needed to fly with an uplink from deep within russia from what I understand, meaning his sats were providing service there, and chances are he supplied the terminals.
Wonder if they'll also have an AI kill chain for healthcare. Would be a neat little trick to reduce costs.
For all practical purposes this already exists and that's because practically speaking it has to. Obviously a health system can't deploy infinity money to save the life of every person who is sick.
Well yeah, US healthcare system is already pretty close to just being an AI kill chain as is. Maybe they could make some cool ads about how they're ruthlessly optimizing that as well, with a little more of a mask off kind of sociopathic approach that they do.
Every healthcare system has mechanisms like what I’m describing.
Clicking "no thanks" on their cookie banner does absolutely nothing. What a sleazy website.
Clicking anything on the banner does absolutely nothing Hanlon's Razor wins out here I think
Ublock origin zapper kills it perfectly, though clearly it shouldn't be needed.
Oh that's great! How did I not know about zapper?! (Usually on desktop I remove annoying things in inspector by just deleting the HTML element manually, but on mobile I usually just closed the site. Glad to have a nice solution now!)
Not reproduced here, where it dismisses the dialog.
On Firefox Mobile (Android) neither button works.
I can't say I understand the Palantir hate. Isn't it just a database analytics SaaS? Why not hate Google as well because government employees who do things you don't like use Google? Is the Palantir hate just manufactured pointless rage or is there an actual reason behind it?
Palantir have the means and at least in the U. S. the call to compile a database combining personal data over many (public) agencies, making a comprehensive surveillance of a population possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530212437/https://www.nytim...
I think a fair number of people who hate Palantir do hate Google too.
Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)
Are you talking about the quote where he referred to people brining Fentanyl in that is killing people?
I didn't see anything wrong with his little speech.
Nope, I'm talking about this, its an older video
https://youtu.be/G5gC_fParbY
with a CEO that openly boast their product is great at getting data to kill people, what's there not to hate?
Google at least pretends to "not be evil".
Palantir is proud of their work on the ICE contract.
Because the founders are evil and should in in prison?
You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Palantir is more directly involved in the surveillance state and military industrial complex.
Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.
Tbh I think public and blatant is preferable.
Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine
Would you prefer that militaries have less-capable software to make targeting decisions?
Perhaps it would be preferable at least to not mix civilian health data or regular business data, with mass surveillance data, and with military industrial complex and kill chain data. It would make sense to have an interest in keeping different kinds of personal data in separate places and not have it thrown around companies with quite different interests or collected together within some company that's involved in quite different industries. So why does it not make sense to apologists of this company?
Are you claiming palantir will put a back door in their software and steal NHS data?
If so, is there any example of them ever doing this to a customer, or is it baseless speculation?
Alternatively, are you climing the NHS is giving planter data and usage rights?
It doesn't matter whether they do or not, the desire to keep separate things separate could be there as is. It might as well not be any of that but just about the kinds of things some companies are involved in.
Again, kind of amusing how that immediately devolves into "are you making an accusation".
How capable it is do you think at this moment. I guess we need 30 more years for software to get better, so less than 20 thousand children dies in the Gaza genocide.
I would prefer that militaries do not deliberately genocide civilians and antagonize non-combatants.
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.
Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/motherhood_statement
No it’s not. It’s totally conceivable that the (perceived) quality of targeting data would contribute to the decision of whether to run a mission at all, and if so how extensively.
isn’t that essentially true of any technology that reduces the civilian casualties of a conflict?
The companies involved definitely want you to think that part of their noble goal is reducing civilian casualties. As far as I can see, though, that is pure propaganda.
You can reduce civilian casualties by reducing the number of people considered civilians.
i am not saying that is the case here, all i am saying is that your argument would apply to any technology that lets you better differentiate/target enemies vs. civilians, which suggests to me it is overbroad.
You are reading perhaps more generality than I intended. To be clear, I am talking about the present greater-Anglo-American military-industrial complex, driven by present ideologies, in which the distinction between “enemy” and “civilian” itself is extremely debatable.
Absolutely.
And that the people who stand to benefit the most from another war might want to filter/target that data in a way to make that more probable?
I mean, I know it's a stretch. Especially with how benevolent our current class of billionaires are. But just imagine a guy who thinks money is more important than anything else. I know... another stretch. lol.
> > Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
You're not actually suggesting that the company providing the data isn't at all part of that process, are you?
Can you, for a second, imagine a company collecting/forwarding only data that's beneficial to it's core objective? Especially one whose led by a guy who has quite literally benefits off of a war????
I am 100% sure you have absolutely no idea what Palantir actually do, and I suggest you go actually read about it. There's plenty of resources out there which will explain in considerable detail what the product is, what the services are, how the services get provided, and the benefits (for example one of Palantir's premier operations is "forward deployed engineers" - which is super-handy for organizations which work in government because it means they come to you and do the installs and setup, but don't keep or even have access to any of the data - the relationship is between you and the specific employees - who in turn need to have Federal clearances - and not Palantir corporate).
This arrangement is extremely conventional, but most company's hate doing it and so don't unless they're operating with the expertise to manage those types of orgs (which is usually only profitable if you have a unique advantage or specialize in seeking a lot of contracts and then navigate the data handling rules to realize - hopefully - some synergies).
I don't like Thiel, but his detractors are also very obviously ignorant as to how any of the Federal government normally works.
lol Found Karpas burner account
You're not actually contending that people at Palantir don't need clearances are you?
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.
The UK doesn’t realize how much working with a US company is going to cost them in the long run. They don’t realize yet the US is not an ally.
What are some valid sovereign alternatives NHS can use?
They could always use Fujitsu/SCL *
* see the Post Office scandal
There is something ironic about the “reject cookies” option not working on that site.
Why would any non US country pay for a dependency anymore on US military products under the current administration...
Because the alternative is even worse?
What can be worse than giving more power to the US?
I can't read the article because the cookie dialog is broken and won't proceed. Chrome on iPhone
Oh, I see. Also broken on desktop but you can still read the article without accepting the cookies, which makes the thing kinda pointless?
Their post endpoint for cookie handling is broken. Giving 403.
Request URL https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/wp-admin/admin-ajax.... Request Method POST Status Code 403 Forbidden Remote Address xxxxxxxxxx Referrer Policy strict-origin-when-cross-origin
payload
set_user_consent val positive security xxxxxxxx
> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.
Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure?
> One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function?
> With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health.
This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?
I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
Peter Thiel says a lot of high and mighty things but has made pretty much all his money in mundane software, mostly ads. So if it offers any solace, I doubt his principles will get in the way of him making money.
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.
The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
> The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
History is quite clear on this: it doesn't work and ends in bloodshed.
Yes. Billionaires with an authoritarian agenda will cost their businesses and their shareholders billions of dollars in pursuit of ideological goals. Throw a few fascist salutes and people stop buying your cars. Was that salute rational? Is rationality even the right question?
So the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens.
Nice...
What could possibly go wrong with giving UK citizen data to ICE, NSA, CIA, Trump, Trumps friends, Trumps friends corporations, Trump's friends foreign political connections, donors to the above etc...
nothing can stop what is coming
The more access Palantir gets the more it becomes what I've feared for years, an unified database where they can use any or all of the following:
Location(s) Phone number(s) Ip(s) Email(s) document(s) comment history(ies)
so on and so on to gather every single thing you've ever done on the internet, it's very dystopia like and I cannot believe that it's legal outside the US for palantir to even operate in.
> the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
LOL I've said the same thing! Turns out I do have something in common with Peter Thiel.
The difference is he's speaking in the context of US which makes his comments on the NHS just disgusting hypocrisy.
Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???
Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.
> the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere.
Um. You realise the vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are owned by private citizens and organizations other than the government right? The only government owned camera I can think of within a mile of here is a traffic camera watching a river crossing. The government has about 300 cameras total in my entire city.
Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.
I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles.
Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.
I'm really confused as to why the Good Law Project thinks this is their fight.
NHS gives contract for cloud database to US cloud software company. This is not that shocking. I'm not clear what they outcome they're looking for .... Using Databricks instead and getting slightly shittier health outcomes so we can be smug we're not connected to Peter Thiel?
The Good Law Project is a left wing activist organisation, and Palantir is a conservative-aligned company.
It really is as simple as that.
If you’re wondering why these HN commenters are so passionately against Palantir, just take a cursory look through their comment history and you’ll understand.
People are tribal.
Had to scroll way too much for the truth.