Campaigners demand judicial review of NHS deal with Peter Thiel's AI firm Palantir Campaign groups are seeking a judicial review of the UK government's decision to award a £23m NHS contract to controversial AI company Palantir. Separate investigations show Palantir had been in discussions with the NHS about exploiting the health data of UK citizens since the middle of 2019, well before the pandemic. In …
Fans of /r/wsb who think Palantir are the next Google would do well to pay close attention to this. Palantir don't win business by shipping a better product or solving customer problems, they use Peter Thiel and co.'s clout to take the chief exec out to dinner and bamboozle them with Top Secret Voodoo ("funded by the CIA wink wink..") and Silicon Valley Exceptionalism. They'll turn this into an eight, nine or even ten figure whole-enterprise transformation deal and deploy a hundred consultants to staff it.
And chances are it won't work. Coca Cola, American Express, Home Depot etc. etc. etc. all speak for themselves.
If it isn't a crime they were allowed anywhere near the NHS it bloody well should be
If it isn't a crime they were allowed anywhere near the NHS it bloody well should be
Most companies have an 'About Us' area with bios of key execs etc. So it would be simple for data miners/aggregators looking to hoover up our personal data to add those data types to those bios. Our data is their data, their data should be our data. Seems fair to me.
Execs may disagree and mutter about privacy, but if they don't want their personal data shared, why do they assume they're entitled to ours?
could anyone enlighten me about the differences about "acting unlawfully", and "breaking the law"? Being cynical, my take would be that "acting unlawfully" is an admission that a court found a politician guilty of breaking the law, but no chop for him, literal of figurative. While "breaking the law" by little people (aka plebs) and being found guilty, involves certain, more or less unpleasant consequences meted out by the Justice System? In other words - no punishment for "acting unlawfully"?
Not exactly the same, but: There are findable explanations on the difference between "illegal" and "unlawful". As I read it, it seems "unlawful" is used when a thing is against the law but not specifically forbidden (e.g. in some countries owning a gun might be a specific, forbidden thing, and therefore illegal). Perhaps you might execute a variety of manoeuvres in your car that are not explicitly listed anywhere as "dangerous driving", but that, being dangerous, are unlawful (but not specifically illegal).
My *guess* therefore is that "acting unlawfully" means something like "breaking the law, but in a way that is not trivial to prove".
This being an IT site, there will no doubt be a lot of lawyers reading who can and will tell me I'm utterly wrong shortly. :-)
it may be that the difference is in the intent: you knowingly break the law, you unknowingly perform an unlawful act.
But since politicians are supposed to know the law, they can't act unlawfully, there is always the expectation of not being caught.
At the end of contract period.
Hands up those of you who would be perfectly fine with the workman to whom you had lent a key to your house (to expedite repairs) making a copy of said key without your knowledge and consent?
Those with hands up, does your view change when you find out said workman has been convicted of multiple burglaries?
The difficulty of enforcing such contracts meaningfully, when oversight is in the hands of the very officials who picked the vendor, is a pretty high bar.
Not to pick on Palantir. They are far from alone.
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