Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it' English hospitals are voicing their concern about the functionality provided by Palantir, the US spy-tech firm that won a £330 million ($437 million) deal to run the Federated Data Platform for NHS England, as around a third of trusts go live on the system. Trusts are organizational units within the National Health Services of …
Given the apparently leader-sanctioned power and data grabs that seems to be going in the US right now, I think it'd be a dereliction of duty for UK PLC not to review matters and ask if it's appropriate for an American corporation to have unfettered access to the health records of the entire nation.
Hell, even on a good day, that question should have been asked - but I guess the right people got invites to the right sporting events or whatever and they 'forgot' to check.
"ask if it's appropriate for an American a foreign corporation to have unfettered access"
Foreign. It doesn't matter who - Americans, Israelis, Norks - what matters is that information on citizens is routinely being handed to foreign actors. Why?
The basis of commercially run business is to sell what you have (or can do). Once you've saturated your original niche, create a larger one by marketing; it doesn't matter what customers actually need as long as you can convince them your offering is. Sometimes the outcome is to the benefit of society, often not. It's taught at business schools that companies must expand to survive - growth is king - irrespective of whether that is to the ultimate good. Maintaining what you already have is not easy as it requires good management, and any weaknesses will lead to shrinkage; hence, it's easier to focus on growth (where management competence is a lot harder to criticise as long as there is growth - even if it falls short of what could actually have been accomplished).
As long as people continue to be sold the story that consumerism is the route to happiness, it will continue - irrespective of the risks. I'm reminded of the computer game "Lemmings"!
"...power the West to its obvious innate superiority."
Or in other words "Amerika uber alles."
This sort of thinking has a long and infamous history and has been used to commit all sorts of unethical and criminal acts, treating "non-Western" peoples as "Others."
Pompous, bombastic and just plain worrying.
Mussolini took credit for work on the railways done by his predecessors. He said he made the trains run on time (when they didn't). The important bit is he convinced others to say he made the trains run on time. This demonstrates to true power of a fascist dictatorship to get things done.
Italian passenger trains never ran on time, and will never run on time, as long as that society thinks that waiting for a little old lady to get on or off is more important than running on time.
A contrast to the Nordic countries, where a little old lady would be deeply offended by idea of having a scheduled service delayed by her inability.
These cultural ideas run deep. Much deeper than political convulsions.
I took my aging parents for a ride on the little yellow train in the French pyrenees. My mother can't walk for any distance, let alone up a mountain, so I thought it would be a good way to see some of the scenery, and so it proved. But fast it isn't. After a couple of hours, mum needed to use the loo. At the next stop we went off to find one. Passing the train driver I mentioned where we were going. He assured us that he would wait for us to return before setting off again.
On the way back the line was blocked by a lorry-load of felled trees accidentally deposited on a level crossing, so bus replacement had to be organised at short notice. It was nearly midnight by the time we got back.
-A.
Possibly because they don't actually write it?
Dig deeper into the onsite staff and discover who they really work for.
Chances are the competent ones are sub-contractors who work for a company most people have never heard of.
That's what these guys do. They round up a bunch of these and (in theory) coordinate their work.
Palantírs were made by elves in Valinor for communication and visions (those were of perhaps dubious utility even back then). They have only become Sauron's spying orbs by the time the LoTR trilogy takes place by the nature of Sauron having access to one and much stronger willpower than any other [potential] user.
... against any homegrown solutions - even if they would save money.
From the link above:
"Baw alleged the pair "(unbeknown to us) were also duplicitously negotiating with Microsoft about a new NHS Enterprise Wide Agreement."
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"Microsoft refused to comment."
Right ...
It would be wonderful if ElReg did a follow up with Baw, NHS and M$.
Just to clear the air a bit, seeing that there is such a shitload of coin involved.
Brown envelopes anyone?
.
At one time the UK Biobank was the supreme resource of medical health data, leading to a wave of medical breakthroughs benefitting UK patients, then recently AWS sent a few consultants in, and now no researcher can work on data offline, all compute needs to be done on AWS resources, irrespective of need.
The analogy here is that irrespective of lacking of feature set, dark origins, lack of competition, problematic as they are, a key issue is that the NHS data will be locked in, within a single opaque processing platform, and then it's trivial for Palantir to set prohibitive access quota. If egress is needed, you'll be told to pay one of the allied big-4 consultancy agencies prohibitive sum to extract data.
Meanwhile, not a word on the value they extract from training models on all of this data, the true reason Palantir got involved at all.
Training models and extracting novel medical discovery from population data such as NHS UK has enormous resale value, and Palantir gets _paid_ for it without sharing improved functionaltiy nor sharing the models, I think some excellent salespeople or lobbyist did a sterling job for Palantir.
Palantir was already a questionable partner for the NHS even before the Trump government. At this point any responsible UK government would be distancing vital services like the NHS as far as possible from a company whose leadership have questionable aims, and who are based in a country that can no longer be seen as a reliable ally. And unlike Microsoft, Palantir are unlikely to even make promises of following local law over US laws.
And now it turns out that what they are selling is functionally worse than the software already in use. And let's not forget that Peter Thiel is a fascist.
I don't know how many red flags that is, but it feels like a lot.
I have several 'apps' on my phone linked to different bits of the NHS but the main monitoring apps are basically American and ignore things like '5 a day' and push American agendas. What is needed today is a move to a SHARED standard of working that is fed by UK suppliers with UK standards. Such things as proper UK nutrition database fed by each manufacturer and distributor in the UK and not defaulting to American material. Things like the NHS 111 service needs to be improved with UK based training and targeting UK services better. AI results I keep getting directed to have a very obvious American bias and the obvious complaint about much of that advice is that none of these systems have the intelligence to say "I can't answer that" preferring to invent something "creative" instead.
Ring fence UK data in a UK based system that is not contaminated by material that originates in other areas of the world. While, yes there are many other cultures present in the UK, the basic platform should provide a BRITISH set of rules and default to British standards! Not trying to make some overseas solution pretend that it does follow those rules?
Open source gets a bad press, but it should be viewed not as a 'free' option, but as a method of working where resources are shared and standards are defined by consensus rather than the biggest cheque book. Rather than 'looking for the best supplier', getting current UK based IT systems to cooperate around an open source standard of data management and require the commercial elements to feed that distributed database with current material such as the nutrition material does not require any one party to have propriety control of anything. Along with making it web based via browsers rather than all these 'apps' that don't seem to be able to talk to one another anyway.
Security of medical data is important, but that should not prevent the cross transfer of that data between even different departments in a hospital because they are using different 'providers'. THAT is a problem I'm seeing today having to register with yet another APP to get physio help and appointments NOT appearing on the 'NHS App' from cardiology. THAT is the real problem here and a 'cloud' solution that avoids the 'non-cloud' solutions of the big providers who are NOT cloud based but ring fencing that data in their own hardware in unknown locations around the rest of the world?
I do hope that the Government has guts enough to force this through and ignore all the "ours is better" complaints. The point is not that Littleton on Ouse Trust does it better, it is that one system overall, for everyone, does it better. Of course good elements of individual enterprises will be incorporated in due course.
