The NHS COVID-19 Data Store sits on a Microsoft Azure platform under contract with NHS England and NHS Improvement. Within that secure cloud processing environment, Palantir (acting under instruction from NHS England) manage their platform which is called Foundry.
Palantir, have built analytical dashboards for access by NHS England and Improvement staff, together with staff in the following organisations working under contract: Faculty AI, McKinsey and Deloittes.
(10.05.2020)
Palantir was co-founded in 2004 by Paypal owner and billionaire Peter Thiel. What the blog doesn’t reveal is that Palantir’s client list has included amomgst others, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS.
Furthermore, in 2016, it was revealed Palantir had a $34.6m contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and helped the Customs and Border Protection Agency create the Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI) system to track immigrants.
Nor does the blog mention that Palantir worked for UK intelligence and was awarded contracts to handle vast data sets on UK citizens for British spy agency GCHQ.
Among his big ideas was to use mobile phone masts and bank data to track our movements, jinxed, he grumbled, by the human rights and data protection laws – but while proposing the greatest, most horrific invasion of our civil liberties, he also admitted that it was “crackers” that he and Boris Johnson were in such positions of power. What we needed, he said, was a “Covid dictator”. Who? Dom nominated a chap called Marc Warner, who apparently runs a data company. Dom would have given Mr Warner “as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do stuff, and pushing the barriers of legality”. This is quite mad, and monstrous.
(10.05.2020)
Palantir was co-founded in 2004 by Paypal owner and billionaire Peter Thiel. What the blog doesn’t reveal is that Palantir’s client list has included amomgst others, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS.
Furthermore, in 2016, it was revealed Palantir had a $34.6m contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and helped the Customs and Border Protection Agency create the Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI) system to track immigrants.
Nor does the blog mention that Palantir worked for UK intelligence and was awarded contracts to handle vast data sets on UK citizens for British spy agency GCHQ.
(05.06.2020)
UK government has published the contracts it holds with private tech firms and the NHS for the creation of a COVID-19 data store, just days after campaigners fired legal shots over a lack of transparency.
Available on the openDemocracy website, the contracts describe how the arrangements between the NHS and Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and AI firms Faculty and Palantir (which subcontracts to AWS) will operate.
We share the common goal of preserving public confidence in systems that can help make us all safer. Therefore, before the NHS continues its plans, we urge you to provide the public with more information and take appropriate measures to reduce risk of data sharing and keep the aggregated data under democratic control.
In March, the NHS announced a new plan to build a datastore that aggregates COVID-19 health data. Microsoft, Google, Palantir, Faculty and Amazon will assist in the development of the datastore and the processing of the data.
(yesterday)
In an open letter directly addressed to the health secretary, civil society organisations, privacy advocates and academic researchers urged Hancock to give the public more information about the datastore and take appropriate measures to reduce data-sharing risks and keep it under democratic control.