Campaign launches to try to force Palantir out of Britain’s NHS | Hacker News Reader

Campaign launches to try to force Palantir out of Britain’s NHS

cnbc.com

192 pointsalexrustic45 comments

See also the forthcoming deadline (June 23rd) for opting out from having all your data irretrievably slurped by the likes of palantir: https://medconfidential.org/how-to-opt-out/

Thank you very much. I'm disgusted by the fact that I have to find out about this through a comment on HN instead of by getting a letter in the mail. Double-u Tee Eff.

Edit: looks like it's England only, but I'm going to make a wild guess and say they didn't get a letter either. Which should have been an opt in thing, by the way!

The UK media is basically as servile to government/establishment interests as the US media these days.

My understanding is that they've always been that way. Not so much in a direct, commanding sense, but more of a hire and promote people who are "good fits" (read: groupthink).

Incredible. I somehow heard about the NHS opt-out, but not about the GP one. I’m appalled by how much disregard the government has for sensitive personal medical information.

I personally believe it’s a question of when, not if, the country-wide database is hacked or leaked.

Yes, we're going through the process now. It's really difficult and appears to me to be deliberately obfuscated - the "opt out" on the NHS website is not the one you want, instead you want the form which you have to send to your local GP. And it's extra effort if you have children (make sure you understand the difference between type 1 and type 2 optouts, oh "and by the way the types changed and we're automatically converting the records for historical reasons").

Plus 'nudge' tactics are out to play in full force - I particularly dislike the pre-emptive strike at social media implying information there would be false despite there not actually being anything on there at the time (I say this as someone who loathes Facebook et al with a passion).

I guess there's a lot of money at stake (there's gold in them thar personal medical records).

I have been consistently appalled by the NHS' willingness to collaborate so freely with data-mining privacy-violating american companies (google, palantir).

Did the UK public consent to having their personal data shared to unaccountable foreign companies? I know I didn't.

What can Palantir do that an NHS-internal team of data engineers and data scientists couldn't?

Am I missing something?

It's a platform play where pipelines would be built and maintained

Charge a lot of money?

Sell data to intelligence agencies around the world.

> Am I missing something?

There's a lot of possibilities at play:

- government entities usually are restricted in paying the salary needed to hire actual experts, meaning they either get bullshitters or have to go for expensive consultants like Palantir, Accidenture and the likes

- alternatively (but with the same end result) government HR lacks the expertise to properly evaluate experts, the home education market does not produce the required experts

- digital illiterates in upper management don't want to hire a team of actual experts for what they deem a one-off job - Europe has strong worker protection laws, remember that - without even thinking a step further

- a lack of trust in the organization - an outside impartial agency given full authority for any access they want by top leadership will face way less resistance from individual data silo leaders, compared to an in-house team

- the obviously shady/illegal (and for the record, I'm not accusing anyone of anything here either, just throwing possibilities around) like kickbacks, campaign donations and other forms of "government influencing"

- the extremely shady stuff - secret services cooperating behind closed doors to get data they would normally being forbidden from accessing by law, by using Palantir as some sort of proxy

Nothing, they provide the software for the data engineers and data scientists to use. It seems that the vast majority of people that have heard of Palantir totally misunderstand what the company actually sells (a software platform) and what they do not sell (data).

I've got several family members who work for the NHS, in back office roles.

At many hospitals employees have to bring in their own milk and coffee; and that they are not permitted a second screen, even if they pay for it themselves.

I can't imagine it's easy to recruit an internal team of data engineers with such austere working conditions.

NHS is government. Government (with a very few exceptions) doesn't have the skill or people who can do big IT projects.

They could if they were willing to spend even a fraction of what they pay companies like Palantir on wages.

GDS (also British Government) is at least one proven tech that came from Government to large acclaim.

But there is also: GCHQ and NSA which are definitely government funded and are some of the most sophisticated digital terror (by their own definition) organisations.

There are a lot of successful government projects, especially those not involving the big consultancies

Not if they keep hiring companies instead of people, of course.

An alternative to a culture change?

Yeah, I think you are missing that the NHS, as an organization, is not good at designing, delivering, and maintaining large software platforms, which is what Palantir is good at.

This is not an insult to the NHS. How on earth could they become good at something like that given that it is a healthcare system? They are also not good at maintaining cellular towers, water treatment, hospital construction, manufacturing their own uniforms, or their own medical equipment. So they pay other firms to provide these products to them rather than trying to adopt an autarky-based model.

Now you could argue that they should have hired another vendor, but without knowing specifics about the bidding process and which other vendors were competing, you are not really in a position to say that this particular vendor wasn't the best for the job.

>Now you could argue that they should have hired another vendor, but without knowing specifics about the bidding process and which other vendors were competing, you are not really in a position to say that this particular vendor wasn't the best for the job.

You're saying that because of the lack of transparency in the bidding process when it was shoved through "as a COVID emergency" we're not in a particular position to say that this vendor wasn't best for the job?

Maybe you are correct. Maybe we just need more faith in the vendor selection honesty of a government that recently contracted the services of a ferry company that didn't own any actual ferries.

> You're saying that because of the lack of transparency in the bidding process

No, I am not saying that at all. Please cite where I said that there was a lack of transparency. I only said that the parent poster would need information in order to make a case, and without that information no case could be made. I have no idea how transparent the process was and whether the relevant oversight controls were properly enforced, nor did I make any claims or assumptions about that, although it sounds like you have some assumptions of your own. If so, please back them up -- if you think there was impropriety in the bidding process, then again some evidence is called for.

Have a Google for "Matt Hancock's neighbour" or "Dido Harding". It's not unknown that there are some questions about UK procurement that need answering.

>Please cite where I said that there was a lack of transparency

This:

>without knowing specifics about the bidding process

Something we don't know because of the lack of transparency, which is (partly) why OpenDemocracy raised a lawsuit.

What would you be referring to if not that?

Is Palantir good at this stuff, though? It sounds like they have a mixed track record on delivering value.

Why do you think that? I know there are a lot of people on the left who hate palantir because law enforcement is one of the sectors they work in, but I don't see how political animosity translates into them not being able to deliver value better than competitors.

This isn't a great take; the fact that Palantir makes technology to racially profile people should mean that the company cannot deliver technology to fulfil the NHS's mission of equity in care "from the cradle to the grave." Additionally, even if Palantir was, not allowing them a contract would be a good sanction to encourage them to write software that treats all people with dignity and respect.

Is there any enterprise grade software contracting firm that have a great track record? It's a difficult space.

> the NHS, as an organization, is not good at designing, delivering, and maintaining large software platforms, which is what Palantir is good at.

Has it ever had the opportunity to try?

Many projects to funnel government money into private companies have not delivered results. Has a large, in-house NHS IT project failed?

Um, yes, but that's not to say that they can't run a better one.

https://www.opensafely.org/

I disagree wholeheartedly

There was no bidding process. They were handed the contract because they said it was £1. Several months later, that price was in the millions. Several months later they had a competition and with no time to handover what had been done, guess who won again?

The GCloud contracts were released following FOI requests.

Actually, you are. Making Palantir responsible for the privacy of medical records is like making a fox responsible for the henhouse. It's the opposite of a good idea.

> What can Palantir do that an NHS-internal team of data engineers and data scientists couldn'

Earn money for Peter Thiel?

Many unknown unknowns are at play. Here's my heuristic: anything Thiel has his fingers in can only be opposed to the public good.

Thiel isn't at all the cartoon villain he's made out to be. That's just lazy partisan propaganda. Read his book "Zero to One" or watch a few of his interviews for a nuanced perspective.

What two parts are those?

No, he's worse.

The NHS is a complex beast that's good at training and paying medical personnel, negotiating drug buys and running hospitals, and it's also actually about 150 mini empires rather than one big thing. None of that is particularly conducive to large scale data analysis.

Any campaign/initiative which does not allow to vote against/dontcare but only counts the voices for is a bullshit. There are so many people around you can get a solid army of supporters literally for anything. Especially if the topic attracts some very vocal groups.

Its ominous that Palantir is openly political, its political goals would be advanced by a collapse of the NHS, and they are being put in charge of critical NHS functions.

Isn't this subject to GDPR (which is still UK law as far as I know), thus requiring explicit consent?

No, because Palantir isn't actually collecting any data. They're building data visualization and interaction software for the NHS. The data stays in the hands of the NHS.

GDPR doesn't apply to state data collection iirc

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