Say No to Palantir in the NHS
notopalantir.goodlawproject.org
notopalantir.goodlawproject.org
Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
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.
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 am pleased to read someone is taking some initiative.
Someone who is more open to a “take the best of what exists” is what is needed.
Appreciate the positive sentiment.
Let me guess, its a new Web Framework isn't it? :P
Wasn’t it both England and Wales?
That's a nice dream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Let private businesses sell insurance. Let people buy what insurance they desire.
Insurance doesn't have to cover everything: any aspect of coverage is debatable since it is a contract between buyer and seller with the courts as the deciding powers when either buyer or seller believes the contract has been violated.
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.
They absolutely should. And it should be free for all and private health care should be absolutely forbidden to force the rich to use the exact same health care system as the poor. That's the only way you get quality. Same with education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Google got their first DoD contract in 2003 from DARPA.
There doesn’t exist a serious technology company ever in the history of technology that didn’t support the state they incorporated in.
You are saying stopping new coal mine means that everyone need to stop heating now and freeze to death this winter.
I think the worry regarding Palantir is that it is explicitly and openly fascist rather than just doing fascism on the side
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
Make the data public if you want to see progress
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
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.
The edit is naive to an extent that makes one wonder if you are writing in good faith.
I don't work for palantir or own their stock. There is really no reason for me to do anything in bad faith here.
But for some reason Palantir is the bad one?
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
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.
Because they pay better.
Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?
NHs FDP (Foundry) still has the vaccine data last time I checked.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
and screwing us for licenses to run apps in "production"
Oh no!..
Data integration is literally Palantir's business.
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.
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
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.
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 all this "lone hero" b.s. by engineers is useful. I don't need someone martyring their careers.
But to answer your other questions...
No, democracy isn't working in US right now. Arguably hasn't for a while, but it's very evident now. Fixing that would likely require amending the constitution; a bar so high that at this point I'm confident that the system is more likely to self-destruct from internal contradictions than to reform.
At the same time, there are literally millions of people in this country who did vote for this and do want it. Even if they had an honest majority, it wouldn't make any of it any less evil. Democracies aren't inherently good.
Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.
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?)
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.
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????
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.
You're not actually contending that people at Palantir don't need clearances are you?
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?
Again, kind of amusing how that immediately devolves into "are you making an accusation".
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
I didn't see anything wrong with his little speech.
Palantir is proud of their work on the ICE contract.
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.
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
* see the Post Office scandal
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.
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.
I believe it is one of the bases for why one side of the political divide makes the claim that this administration is somehow uniquely fascist, even though they are categorically wrong, but are responding to he ensnaring and strapping of corporations to the service of the government.
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.
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.
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.
History is quite clear on this: it doesn't work and ends in bloodshed.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.