Palantir: NHS faces legal action over data firm contract

It at least makes me wonder if this selection was intentional & what the relationship between the two & the intelligence communities of both the U.S. and the U.K. are

The document I linked says they do have these controls in place but having done my fair slog in the NHS I'm doubtful.

For example - drug manufacturers want to know demand so they can plan ahead. But in the UK, doctors, NHS, DOH etc don't share that data of usage as would be granular enough to be possibly identifiable - so how do they get the data.

Well, chemists/hospitals are supplied by a few companies(Think Amazon for drugs/medical supplies) - they can from ordering terminals from those customers, give hourly totals level of demand to the manufacturers if they will pay for it. See, the distributors are and have been in a position for decades to cash in upon selling such data at a level in which you will not identify any single individual ever. Also was secure back then on many levels for transfer. Oh and those rare drugs that only few people have - that and other area's of data is never sold. What data is sold is you everyday drugs, as manufacturing really does have to plan ahead more with some drugs than others, more so when the shelf life various as does storage and then some customers will only take drugs with at least X time left until expiry. So planning supply and demand really does get very complicated, very quickly. Hence knowing as real-time

I've worked upon such a system at a large EU based company 20 odd years ago, also worked at the UK DOH during the transition days from Conservative to Labour and ironical just the other day found the old Tony Blair letter introducing the new future ahead to DOH staff.

Now in this case they say aggregated data, which can be done in a way that if you can pick out an individual, you would of already mastered unscrambling eggs.