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Comment by harvey9 | Hacker News Reader

FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.

Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.

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What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.

This is not a good faith argument

Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.

If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.

I trust Palantir about the same as I trust the Chinese government with my health data.

Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).

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.

Your caveats of "rarely" and "usually" undermine the "anything" you use.

The edit is naive to an extent that makes one wonder if you are writing in good faith.

It depends on the contract with palantir. So in reality it depends on how NHS structured the contract and the infrastructure. That's the reason for rarely/usually.

I don't work for palantir or own their stock. There is really no reason for me to do anything in bad faith here.

We use Microsoft Windows, HP, Dell, AWS and Chinese made hardware... All foreign designed and built tech stack.

But for some reason Palantir is the bad one?

Not to the public, but University hospitals often have researchers trudging through their data. Junior doctors often audit patient data. Palantir isn't the first organisation to look at patient data.

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