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.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
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.)
Companies that submit bids for contracts get contracts. You would be surprised at the diversity of size and scale of companies which service defense contracts in particular - very small companies can end up in big supply chains because they're the ones who turn up to make the part.
As cliche is it to cry whataboutism, this clearly is. Incrementalism is better than nothing. Sanctimony is FUD. If even one company is suffers at least it’ll serve as a warning to the others.
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
I’ve heard Foundry is not only insanely expensive, but to actually accomplish something comparable to the demos in your domain requires a huge amount of integration work to build it out in a way that locks you in.
You can be skeptical of both but Palantir and Peter Thiel especially are categorically horrible, and have shown to solely value increasing their net worth more than all else.
Yeah yeah capitalism optimize for shareholders, but there are plenty of successful large companies that haven't built an entire brand out of directly enabling large entities to erode any semblance of freedom we have left.
As somebody that works in the biotech/health space, this page is not that exciting?
The bottleneck in drug development is not discovery; we have to test more hypotheses more efficiently, not generate more hypotheses. You don't need a product like foundry to have reproducibility or share pipeline templates; there are already free, scripting-language-agnostic workflow tools.
Healthcare use of foundry != biotech/bioinformatics use of foundry?
A former work colleague works in health ontologies. They are complicated and include EMT and ward staff using terms of art with inverse meaning.
Perhaps I misread your intent, belittling complexity in somebody else's information space (eg a function of multiple parallel legacy systems and organisational change) seems unhelpful. You weren't excited, maybe people on the management and health economics side were?
They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
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.
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.
All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.
Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
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?
Palantir puts money in some of the worst people on this planet's pockets, that's reason enough? Theil and co are trying to set up their little "arbeit macht frei" cities and replace democracy with some kind of neo-feudalism where his kind get to play absolute monarch.
Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)
Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine
That's a "motherhood statement"[1] - you haven't answered the question.
Militaries make targeting decisions with data. That's entirely separate to whether they have been ordered by civilian government to target something, and Palantir do not control that part of decision making (you as a voter do! You did vote right?)
No it’s not. It’s totally conceivable that the (perceived) quality of targeting data would contribute to the decision of whether to run a mission at all, and if so how extensively.
You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.
Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.
Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.
This got me thinking. In any country or ethnic group, it’s so important to differentiate between the average person trying to get by and the aggressors who claim to be their leaders. When we look at the world through the lens of political and military leaders, we miss so much of the humanity of everyday people.
Make the data public if you want to see progress
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