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Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

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41–50 of 80 posts

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people talk about it but from a different context. The NHS is being de-funded by the same politicians whose friends benefit from these deals. Hard to hire competent people when your budget keeps getting cut.

https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ Total health spending in England was around £129 billion in 2018/19 and is expected to rise to nearly £134 billion by 2019/20, taking inflation into account.

How much of that is spent on front-line service provision, and how much on "management"?

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people talk about it but from a different context. The NHS is being de-funded by the same politicians whose friends benefit from these deals. Hard to hire competent people when your budget keeps getting cut.

£136.7 billion seems like a lot. It also seems like it's been exponentially going up since 1950.

“Exponential” is almost certainly a good approximation, as I expect it to match the product of wage inflation and population.

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#43
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would palantir risk their EU business by breaking the trust of the contract and move information to the US?

Because the NHS is about to be sold off as part of Brexit, and they can profit hugely from a slice of that action, while pretending they followed the rules until Brexit was completed.

I haven't seen any plans to privatize NHS as part of Brexit (and it's not clear why the two would be related, anyway).

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ Total health spending in England was around £129 billion in 2018/19 and is expected to rise to nearly £134 billion by 2019/20, taking inflation into account.

How much of that is spent on front-line service provision, and how much on "management"?

Roughly 8% is spent on management which makes up 4% of the workforce. Which is significantly less than the private sector. That took me 60 seconds to Google btw.

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#45

The data for use in model training is worth far more to Palantir. They can spin it as being nice and helping with COVID-19 but in reality Palantir couldn’t buy this data even if they wanted to... so they got the U.K. government to give it to them! Clever.

Just wait a year or two and you'll find that somebody with influence on the decision gets a well paid cushy job in the private sector. Perhaps one of those 200K-per-appearance type jobs as a "senior advisor" for a bank.

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#46
post #5

Has anyone tried to do a GDPR request yet to either see what data they actually hold, or to test the right to erasure?

Actually good question, I would like to know how these requests are handled post Brexit. Do A.13 GDPR requests still have to be honoured by the UK up to the Brexit date forever?

Until it is amended or repealed, all European law is brought into UK law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. (Formerly, it was brought in through the European Communities Act.)

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/16/crossheading/ret...

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#47
Honestly borders to me on being de-facto undemocratic because I doubt a lot of British citizens are aware of this or that there has been any sort of meaningful consent given by patients to outsource their data to a foreign intelligence firm.

When it comes to how to solve this I really think we need to fundamentally rethink data ownership both on a legal as well at a technical level. I was recently reading up on Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID and I think something like that should be the default for all our data. We store our own healthcare data in something akin to a pod, when the NHS uses that data they get access to it granted by the patient in a way that puts formal limits on what they can do with it and how long they have access to it, and I as the patient have both the right and technical ability to revoke that access. We really need to push for data ownership and strong guarantees for data rather than this through the backdoor process of shoving private health data to unaccountable firms.

Maybe this is something where all these smart contract and decentralisation technologies can play a meaningful role rather than being primarily used for speculative currencies.

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#48
post #38

From my understanding Foundry (the Palantir product in question) is just a data management platform. I don't understand why this is so nefarious: they gave software they usually charge for to a public health agency for free.

The section on controversies is a primer. It certainly seems worth questioning the intent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#49
Pseudo-patronage, or charity-software, it's the new model being pushed by GAFAM (and Palantir) in order to access to digital public services markets in the EU. It's quite certainly illegal though - procurement regulations, etc., but nobody seems to care, especially not in the local software industry. No wonder the EU are so much behind when it comes to digital industry. They don't even try to fight.

Re: Britain gave Palantir access to sensitive COVID-19 patient records in £1 deal

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://fullfact.org/health/spending-english-nhs/ Total health spending in England was around £129 billion in 2018/19 and is expected to rise to nearly £134 billion by 2019/20, taking inflation into account.

That comes out to $2k/year/UK resident which is amazingly low I'd say. Staff are also limited to 1% salary increase per year since 2010 which is below inflation.

A little pedantic - England is not the UK and that budget quoted above was for England. The budget for all countries is larger, and England spends a bit less per citizen than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. https://fullfact.org/health/what-is-the-nhs-budget/
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