Healthcare campaigners turn up the heat on Palantir at Labour conference Campaigners against Palantir's involvement in the UK's health sector are set to make themselves heard this week with planned protests at the Labour Party conference and in London. Health justice charity MedAct and medical campaign group Just Treatment are coordinating a protest at the ruling party's annual conference in …
"Earlier this month, Palantir hired former Labour Party deputy Tom Watson to help guide its work with the UK government."
Heineken[Tom Watson] reaches the parts other beers can't reach
I guess he's still got a pass for all the restaurants and watering holes at Westminster where hungry and thirsty government ministers congregate
I guess he's still got a pass for all the restaurants and watering holes at Westminster where hungry and thirsty government ministers congregate
Allegedly he surrendered it when he took his leave of absence from the Lords to accept this job, however he could still be easily booked in as a guest to any of the public or non-MP-only bars and restaurants on the HoC Westminster Estate.
If we can't breakaway from Palantir, widely recognised as one of the worse of the worse, it seems there's little chance of Britain ever gaining digital sovereignty. Not during Burnham's presidency, and less likely should Conservatives or Reform seize power.
It's this kind of language that reinforces the idea that only The Left are entitled to govern.
It's the language Conservatives and the right use themselves - from 'conservativepost.co.uk' -
"Tories Seize Back London’s ‘Crown Jewels’ as Badenoch Scores Major Wandsworth and Westminster Wins"
And pretty much everyone else. The interpretation that it is used to suggest only the left are entitled to govern is incorrect.
"Campaigners against Palantir's involvement in the UK's health sector are set to make themselves heard this week with planned protests at the Labour Party conference and in London.Health justice charity MedAct and medical campaign group Just Treatment are coordinating a protest at the ruling party's annual conference in Liverpool as ministers consider whether to extend the NHS's contract with the US spy-tech company."
I realise you mention NHS England in the rest of the article, but this part makes it unclear that this ONLY involves England.
(Not saying this as a weird gloat, I want Palantir out of my English friends NHS, and also our collective government and military too)
Where do you even begin with Palantir? It's like Cambridge Analytical on steroids. It even has a lot it's former staff. It has it's fingers in everything. Even things you wouldn't be aware of unless you did a bit of digging. Face ID/Physical ID companies for age verification. If you have an investment group in Palantir that is also an investment group in the age verification companies then they are linked. It's a crafty way of getting round having to be explicit about links between companies. Then we have them handling military data for multiple countries. No conflict there...
That data in the NHS is not safe with Palantir. It never has been. You might as well just give OpenAI access.
We should never have got into bed with these sorts of companies and the sooner we sneak off quietly in the morning the better. Sure, there may be a hangover but it'll wear off.
I'd go further and say we should be digging into the connections of the people who put them there in the first place. Boris Johnson and his dodgy far-right mates, including the Russian oligarchs and their yacht parties, and before him, Gideon and his addiction to Russian cash. It's not just the Russians, though, there's deep connections to people like Steve Bannon and other far-right agitators in the US, as well as all these peope with apartheid-era South African links like Thiel and Musk. The whole thing stinks; how anyone can not think there's wholesale foreign interference in UK politics is beyond me.
No kidding. Then we have trump jr getting a giant wedding party from, ... the Russians. https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin Can you imagine if Hunter Biden had done this how faux news would be throwing an absolute shitfit? Crickets from our R's in the US. Crickets.
"Where do you even begin with Palantir?"
Well, the name for a start. Named after the all seeing stones invented by Tolkien in the lord of the rings. The stones that have supernatural powers to see into anything and were deemed (by the goodies) to be too dangerous to allow to exist.
There's a clue there.
Thank you for your continued corporation with the russian empire. All of your data has been sent to putin for further analysis. Failure to continue to hand over your persona to the empire will result in a lack of financial payment and denazification. All will be russia.
"[Palantir] ... maintains that the data processed through the FDP belongs to the NHS and that disclosing it to anyone else would breach its contract."
Except that the US CLOUD Act enables the US Government to slurp any or all of this data whenever it feels like lt.
>CLOUD Act enables the US Government to slurp
I keep seeing this being repeated about the Cloud Act and whilst it is certainly true in itself, I do wonder whether it distracts from the bigger picture for those of us in the UK (or AU NZ or CA).
The bigger picture being that in the UK the Security Service can and does demand access to, and copies of, any dataset that takes their interest, and medical records will always be near the top of that list. And thanks to Snowden we know that as long ago as 2012 that Five Eyes countries had google style searchable access to all this info and crucially to the point about the Cloud Act, each country had access to every other country's data. And that was 2012 and now they've got an AI layer sitting on top of it all.
So yes, call out the Cloud Act if you wish, but remember the bigger picture, and that horse bolted decades ago.
This is a point I've made as well.
The thing people usually miss is that spies or whatever in your own country can't spy on you but if they get it from another country they don't break any laws. Same goes for data. Even after Prism no country plugged those gaps so it's a free for all on all everything.
I would say in this case the cloud act is relevant. The data from Palantir is most likely stored in the US. The cloud acts allows extraction and give it back to Palantir or whoever to do as they wish. No contracts or laws are broken.
It doesn't matter where the data actually is.
18 U.S.C. § 2713
"A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall comply with the obligations of this chapter to preserve, backup, or disclose the contents of a wire or electronic communication and any record or other information pertaining to a customer or subscriber within such provider’s possession, custody, or control, regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States."
Palintir are a US based company subject to US law.
You would have hoped the NHS and government knew this before getting into bed with them. All our data belong to us.
Palintir are a US based company subject to US law.
You would have hoped the NHS and government knew this before getting into bed with them. All our data belong to us.
They will be relying on Privacy ShieldFigleaf to make it legal. Until that all comes tumbling down when Max Shrems/NOYB gets "Shrems 3" through the grind of the judicial system and it's declared invalid. Then we'll get some new form of privacy figleaf designed to allow business as usual until that's struck down.
As things stand, it is not possible to comply with EU or UK data protection laws if any personal information is transmitted, stored, or processed in any system with connections to the US. Privacy ShieldFigleaf is designed to make it look legal, but until the USA fundamentally change their laws (or we cave in and scrap ours), the two legal systems are incompatible[period]
What it says and what they will do when US/FISA issues a secret subpoena for the data is a different question. So say you are the CEO of palantir and the feds walk into your office with the subpoena, and a set of handcuffs. They give you a choice. They leave with the data that want, or they leave with you. And note UK, will never know the data was exfiltrated. What would you do?
