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

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61–70 of 80 posts

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

#61
post #53

How is this any different from Amazon offering the NHS Amazon RDS licenses for free/£1? Is the argument against this that the NHS not be allowed to use any cloud infrastructure, and that everything ought to be on-premise?

Rather than being some ostensibly neutral cloud, Palantir was/is CIA funded. So data straight into CIA/NSA/whomevers hands.

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

#63
Disturbing. When you cannot even trust your own health-care system and government to even have the ambition to safeguard your sensitive data. What are citizens supposed to do? It’s tragic how democracy have been so deeply undermined by private interests. This is not how it was supposed to work. Truly a disgrace.

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

#64

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 B…

> 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

If that's what SOLID is, its a scam and more of his DRM promotion. There is no technical way to "revoke my access." Unless you have a memory erasing implant in my brain, if the data gets onto my screen, I can copy it and access it forever. Period. Fuck Tim Berners-Lee.

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

#65

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 B…

> 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 If that's what SOLID is, its a scam and more of his DRM promotion. There is no technical way to "revoke my access." Unless you have a memory erasing implant in my brain, if the data gets onto my screen, I can copy it and access it fore…

[deleted]

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

#66
post #53

How is this any different from Amazon offering the NHS Amazon RDS licenses for free/£1? Is the argument against this that the NHS not be allowed to use any cloud infrastructure, and that everything ought to be on-premise?

AWS do not have the legal right to use data in an RDS-managed database, and there would be hell to pay in terms of off-AWS migrations if they were ever found to be using customer data where they claim not to. Palantir is not a "cloud service" in the same way.

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

#67

Funny how no one wants to talk about the reason that the NHS is doing these deals. Of all the competent devs / data analyst in the UK, how many do you think actually want to work at the NHS? So lots of demand / need (healthcare is a mess in part because of data management via paper) and no supply / interest of talent.

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.

I have worked extensively with the NHS and organisations who are attached to it. Part of the problem is that the NHS cannot pay market rates for developers, so they resort to contractors instead who are accounted for differently, and where the total cost is _much_ higher.

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

#68
post #16

The article text seems to indicate that Palantir was offering data analysis software/services to the British government for a nominal fee. It doesn't seem like NHS was selling the data, they just needed some services, and paying £1 was required to bind Palantir in a contract. This title really seems like click-bait.

So the NHS wasn't selling the data to Palantir, just giving it away?

Is Palantir buying the data or is the NHS using Palantir to analyze it? There's a big difference there.

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

#69
post #66
post #53

How is this any different from Amazon offering the NHS Amazon RDS licenses for free/£1? Is the argument against this that the NHS not be allowed to use any cloud infrastructure, and that everything ought to be on-premise?

AWS do not have the legal right to use data in an RDS-managed database, and there would be hell to pay in terms of off-AWS migrations if they were ever found to be using customer data where they claim not to. Palantir is not a "cloud service" in the same way.

Structurally speaking, what mechanism prevents Amazon from being able to access RDS-managed customer data that doesn't prevent Palantir from doing the same?

As far as I'm aware, Palantir doesn't claim to share data between its customers. It works with governments all over the world — ostensibly this means that either Palantir agrees to not share its customers data with other customers, or every government is implicitly consenting to their citizens' data being accessed by every other government.

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

#70
post #53

How is this any different from Amazon offering the NHS Amazon RDS licenses for free/£1? Is the argument against this that the NHS not be allowed to use any cloud infrastructure, and that everything ought to be on-premise?

Rather than being some ostensibly neutral cloud, Palantir was/is CIA funded. So data straight into CIA/NSA/whomevers hands.

As far as I'm aware, Palantir is basically a SaaS data analytics provider for governments all over the world.

Why would any government consent to working with Palantir if they had any suspicion that their data might be used by US government clandestine agencies?

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