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People seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted.

Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.

Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk.

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.

We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.

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.

This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.
But Palantir is a software company. Do you feel similarly about the NHS using AWS/Azure/GCP? Do we want it all on some on prem homemade stack?
Everyone should say no to palantir anywhere, especially outside the US.
Palantir is inside Coles supermarkets in Australia. I've stopped going to Coles because of that.

https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...

I assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.
You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.

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.)

And inside the US too!
They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
Why?
Why?
My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.

Make the data public if you want to see progress

From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.

Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.

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.

> My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.

Because they pay better.

Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?

There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
Palantir provide the software stack, they don't do the research.
So what are they using this software for, what's the proposed alternative, and what makes that alternative work better for their use case?
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.

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

It's totally reasonable to be skeptical of palantir without knowing the exact product in question, given their record.
Clicking "no thanks" on their cookie banner does absolutely nothing. What a sleazy website.
I don't know if you all know this, but Palantir offers ai/analytics services that are not just for governments. That's how they started out, but don't be surprised seeing random companies using them same as they would elastic, splunk and the like.

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.

Wonder if they'll also have an AI kill chain for healthcare. Would be a neat little trick to reduce costs.
I can't say I understand the Palantir hate. Isn't it just a database analytics SaaS? Why not hate Google as well because government employees who do things you don't like use Google? Is the Palantir hate just manufactured pointless rage or is there an actual reason behind it?
Why would any non US country pay for a dependency anymore on US military products under the current administration...
The more access Palantir gets the more it becomes what I've feared for years, an unified database where they can use any or all of the following:

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.

I can't read the article because the cookie dialog is broken and won't proceed. Chrome on iPhone
Friend of a friend was working on a Palantir NHS integration a few years before the pandemic, so I'm pretty sure this ship has sailed.
What are some valid sovereign alternatives NHS can use?
The UK doesn’t realize how much working with a US company is going to cost them in the long run. They don’t realize yet the US is not an ally.
From what I can tell, it's just a data integration platform. This article seems like a smear campaign.
There is something ironic about the “reject cookies” option not working on that site.
Excuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS???

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.

> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza.

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.

So the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens.

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...

> the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

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.

Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.

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.

I'm really confused as to why the Good Law Project thinks this is their fight.

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?