UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir without patient consent | Hacker News Reader

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir without patient consent

theregister.com

103 pointsLinuxBender17 comments

This whole article is bizarre. Imagine an article saying “UK government set to extract hospital data to Excel without patient consent”. Or “SQLite”. Or “Amazon RDS”. Or “Microsoft 365”. Or “Google Sheets”. Or “IBM”.

Palantir is, as far as I can tell, not a building full of giant disks and evil arch-villains trying to make billions of dollars by looking at your personal data. Nor is it an advertising or data company (like Google or Meta or Equifax) trying to make billions of dollars off your personal data. It’s a software and SaaS company selling tools and a consultancy helping clients use them.

So maybe someone here is up to no good with someone’s data, but this is not at all implied by anyone’s mere use or Palantir.

To the extend anything nefarious is going on, I would imagine that someone is overpaying and/or receiving an underperforming service. Think about everything Accenture is infamous for.

> This whole article is bizarre. Imagine an article saying “UK government set to extract hospital data to ... “Microsoft 365” or “Google Sheets”

Or to Yandex or another system controlled by a foreign government. What gives you the impression someone else is at liberty to take my data ant put into a place where it will be stolen>?

Maybe they should consider rebranding, then. The word comes from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series - the palantir were telepathic communication devices which were often used to deceive others by showing selective truths and lies of omission.

That describes what they do perfectly.

Not really. They are in the business of spying on every living human being and offering that as a service to more or less scrupulous agencies.

Citation needed. They are certainly in the business of selling software that is useful for those who spy on people. But where is any actual evidence that Palantir spies on anyone?

(I have no particular interest in Palantir.)

They offer SaaS only.

so I believe this initiative is problematic but I feel activists are shooting themselves in the foot talking about privacy and conspiracy. The issue is lock-in -- the authority is mandating compatibility with proprietary Palantir feature sets (for example approach to federation and access control) and use at a local level (outside NHS-E) as a cost saving measure (the cost saving part means replace not dual operate 2 platforms). This is signaled strongly here and in the FDP procurement.

Well, regarding evil arch-villains, they have Peter Thiel, so one could argue about that…

https://youtu.be/S-Jo-djilvo

These headlines are always about the UK, and then it turns out it's just England.

Never mind, I don't know why I'm surprised by bad journalism anymore...

It's the UK Government pushing this. They manage NHS England directly.

It's not inaccurate.

I think the point being made is that health is devolved, and this story affects NHS England, but not the other NHS systems in Wales, Scotland, or NI. This is a common problem with reporting on the NHS - journos often say "The UK NHS" when they mean England.

(It's arguable about whether, and how much, an arms-length-body is directly managed by the department of health and social care but I don't think we're going to agree. People who are interested in the detail can read more here: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2017-Short... (It's a bit out of date, there's been some consolidation)).

I don’t think anybody outside the UK knows of or cares about the difference.

People forget that the UK government is defunding the English NHS, and there's a good chance this won't happen because the budget got cut.

https://twitter.com/ncarding/status/1589642773011263489?s=20...

Is this different from the GP data? Didn't we had to opt out of sharing GP data a while back? Still think this should all be opt-in

Amazing what emergency powers and justification can allow you to circumvent.

Also, why the hell does this matter other than to imply conspiratorial intent?

>Palantir has provided technology used by the CIA and controversial US immigration agency ICE.

There is no particular need to imply conspiratorial intent for a US-based company, especially a US-based government surveillance contractor, when the US government believes non-citizens do not have any right to privacy or even standing to sue over privacy violations (and apparently so does the wider US public to some extent, given how the Snowden headlines there took care to mention “spying on US cizitens”). When a government explicitly and publicly gives itself the right to access foreigners’ data stored by foreign (subsidiary) companies[1], you don’t exactly have to take out your tinfoil hat before expecting it to access that data.

However, I would normally read the quoted line as a piece of evidence concerning Palantir’s general approach to ethics and/or the extent of their entanglement with the US executive, for those who haven’t heard of the company before, not as a sneaky allegation of conspiracy.

(Lest it sound like I’m dunking on the US, I don’t think the government of the UK really needs emergency powers to do whatever the hell it wants to, including secretly granting intelligence agents immunity from inconvenient parts of the law[2],—there isn’t really a separation of powers there except by tacit agreement, as far as I’ve been able to understand.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/05/mi5-policy-g...

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