Palantir lands £23m NHS data deal
opendemocracy.net
opendemocracy.net
This is a funny way of describing Palantir. They are just consultants plus data management software. That’s it. They are no more “AI” than any company that can run Python pipelines.
I’m not sure if this is PR by Palantir trying to up their stock. Or stupid press not understanding data engineering.
By the way, the EU is monitoring Palantir’s presence in Europe. There is feeling that Palantir’a services are “planted” rather than “requested”.
Before Snowden one could argue these are wild conspiracies, post-Snowden, I cannot think of a reason for a government to accept official spyware on its digital soil other than lack of sovereignty.
Would China and Russia accept Palantir as a big data analysis system to fight COVID?
I can’t find any source for this. In-q-tel was an early finder but they spun out of PayPal and have always had PayPal and finance as clients from inception.
Isn't the 1st step of any AI to collect as much pertinent data as possible? The potential I see in Palantir is that they have the base infrastructure covered (talent, tech stack, business relationships) to connect to all sorts of disconnected database sources.
The 2nd step will be to analyze that data for insights using opensource or in-house engineered algorithms - not Palantir's role right now.
Ex: My past firm played with Datarobot's AI solutions which tried to outsource data scientists as "consultants" but did not work very well due to lack of data engineering/domain expertise.
Could this be Palantir's next move?
Note: This may sound mildly speculative, but trying to approach it from an engineering and business perspective.
It’s the same risk if Microsoft cracked open all the sql dbs to analyze and train AIs. Or if AWS tried to use data stored with them. I’m sure it would be useful but would break every contract they have and since they are trying to make money off cloud services that’s a big risk for minimal return.
So unless there’s more evidence just saying something is possible is a rabbit hole for every cloud provider, right?
Anybody could understand the difference between data engineering and "AI" in 30 mins of research, which is a lot less time than they have to research a story. Whenever a journalist "doesn't understand" something that could be learned with a simple google search, it's not stupidity, it's malicious. In this case the journalist is pretending to write a story about Palantir winning a contract, but really writing a part of the continuing story "Palantir (and the tech industry in general) is evil and powerful and you should be scared."
This is just another case of journalists responding to tech companies own PR because they entirely operate from press releases and marketing material. See Cambridge Analytics.
Bingo -- not just limited to data engineering though.
1. Hyped based on marketing or
2. Speculative because of secrecy
Apple has both, Palantir is mostly the 2nd because of the nature of their work
And Dropbox is just FTP and rsync, right?
Buying palantir is similar to buying IBM Watson. It is going to take months before anything is being installed. Most of what they are doing is consulting and database administration
I'm in no way a Trump-fan, but sentences like the above immediately puts me into the opinion that this article is going to be one-sided - and hence I stopped reading. I don't read www.opendemocracy.net (first time I've encountered it), so perhaps that's there thing?
Is it the adjective secretive that turned you away?
“billionaire investor Peter Thiel.”
The man has an identity outside just being a “Trump backer”. Using that descriptor specifically chooses a minor, politically motivated detail about someone and concludes to the rightful reaction of turning away.
Choosing to write a “news” article while also choosing descriptors like that make this an opinion piece, not a news article. I think it’s what is fundamentally wrong with most of the Information passed around today; you can’t escape the opinions buried neatly inside EVERY article, desperately persuading you to think and feel a certain way. Everything’s hostile these days, just constantly attacking your mindset.
Describing it as this is also editorial. You just want them to follow your editorial line instead of their own.
A HN user / comment can be as biased and editorialized as they like, the same shouldn't be true for ' traditional media outlets ' whatever that means.
As far as I'm concerned, it is objectively true that this is a minor, politically motivated detail although it is still relevant information. They could have mentioned that somewhere in the article without appending it as a prefix / title to his name. That's rather disingenuous. It's not his main defining characteristic.
That being said, I believe one should not necessarily turn away from what they perceive to be propaganda of one kind or another, but rather view it as such and analyse it, although this can be irritating at times.
FWIW, Thiel has also backed 48+ other political candidates over the years, maybe we should add all of that to his name ? ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Support_for_politi...
Barring the fact that I don't expect to get journalistic integrity from a source such as "opendemocracy.net", I wanted to still highlight the irresponsibility in describing an individual like Thiel in such a specific way.
A quick Google on Thiel reveals he's 53 years old and has led a life FULL of detail that dwarfs his political choices in the last 4 years. One could write very thick books on this individuals life (and it looks like they already have in some context).
Using the descriptor of 'Trump Backer' is deliberately prioritizing one single personal choice the subject individual made in a time representing roughly <7% of his total existence.
I don't think it's editorial to say it's politically motivated at all. If you simply remove the specific subject matter of the descriptor used and instead, rely on its representation of the overall individual, its statistical irrelevance to the whole easily identifies its gross misuse as title descriptor of that individual.
I would go as far to say, that not only is it not editorial to arrive to such a conclusion, I think it hard-pressed to not describe it as a factual occurrence.
It's the sort of pathetic "supports Trump - must be a bad guy" association that is the hallmark of bad and biased journalism.
If you really struggled to see that and weren't being disingenuous you should clarify how it's relevant.
Probably a dumb question, but - if every other entity in the EU has to comply with GDPR rules, why don't they have to? How is it that the government can pass the data so freely to Palantir? I know that GDPR won't apply anymore after the 1st of Jan, but it still applied during the transition period?
I'm certainly not pretending to be nowhere near knowledgeable about the topic, and it would be great to hear from someone that does, but it seems to me that the public has legal GDPR grounds on which to protest this data transfer? I, for one, certainly don't want Palantir holding my data.
However, there is also an obligation under Article 9 to have "law which provides for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the rights and freedoms of the data subject, in particular professional secrecy", and more generally the provisions of the GDPR about acceptable processing and protecting data subjects still apply.
Recital 54 also specifically states, "Such processing of data concerning health for reasons of public interest should not result in personal data being processed for other purposes by third parties such as employers or insurance and banking companies."
So as things stand, it appears that the UK government won't necessarily be in violation of the GDPR by giving personal health data to Palantir, but any processing will only be legal if the required safeguards are explicitly encoded in law and if that data is not being processed by Palantir for any other purposes.
[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ at 1(e)
[2] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/ at 2(i)
What bit of GDPR do you think requires this?
It's amazing how the pro vote was to strengthen the sovereignty of Britain outside of the EU and all indications are that sovereignty was just, uh, transferred to anyone who will pay in exchange for stop-the-bleeding type trade deals.
Palantir has a bad rap in SV because liberal media likes to criticize it mainly due to its work with ICE.
There are articles online speculating on the validity of Karp’s claims about his philosophy background, or Palantir’s rumors on helping take down Osama Bin Laden as intentional propaganda. I suspect a lot of these comes as misinformation campaigns to discredit the firm.
I tried to investigate a report by Mijente and stopped early due to its data being mostly baseless personal accusations on Thiel (common tactic when pertinent proof is lacking), which seems primarily motivated by a political agenda
https://notechforice.com/palantir/
Help me if I am wrong, but to me it seems the media is being heavily biased against Palantir because the firm denounced Silicon Valley’s values...
Note: Another analogy of double standards is how Apple and Tesla get all the hype, masqueraded by “user privacy” and “saving the environment” PR, while online communities (HN, Reddit) brush away human right violations such as slave labor or work abuse allegations. The brainwashing is clearly working...
I don't know why people get caught up in the "ethical and moral baggage". You have no real power to determine what the world in 10 years will look like. You do however have the ability to control what your world looks like, when you are sitting on bags of money. Sail in the direction of the wind, not against it.
You might not be convinced yet so here’s some further evidence. First look at the websites of Morningstar and see how much of the screen real estate is dedicated towards ethical and responsible investments. Years ago, this didn’t exist. Look at the returns of VOO vs. ESGV now. You’ll see that ESGV has outperformed VOO!
Do you know what sucks more than being on the bad side? Being on the bad and the loosing side. :)
Make money, if people get hurt, it was a likely outcome, so why not benefit financially?
I am not seeing how this is helpful to you or anyone really, but respect that we all have different experiences.
The last person told me in the same conversation that Peter Thiel would recognize him. As Mr. Thiel has many interests, there was no reason to believe this person was connected to Palantir. However, Palantir sure came to mind while I processed this last interaction like a deer in headlights.
Why? What was their motivation.
many celebs have personal protection details. how such protection details behave likely varies widely..
as for your concerns, pay close attention to your cybersecurity posture before engaging with people who will draw attention to you simply by association.