Former Paypal founder and Trump donor Peter Thiel owns a company called Palantir that has won five NHS contracts in a row without tender. To jog the memory, Palantir is a data mining company that was in part funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture fund and which helped to track down Osama bin Laden. Palantir’s advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, both of whom I am sure are outstanding individuals of the type you may wish to entrust with information about any embarrassing ailment you might have.
Palantir claims to have data privacy standards that exceed the legal requirements—of the US. Whilst making reference to GDPR on the Data Protection and Governance page of Palantir’s website, it seems to fall short of explicitly stating that it complies.Of course, post Brexit the UK can choose to interpret and implement GDPR however it sees fit and call it its own standard.
Eleven NHS trusts have so far paused or suspended trials of Palantir’s Foundry database with questions about its usefulness, but even so the government seems set to award Palantir a £480m NHS contract later this year to run a “Federated Data Platform”
You can read more about Palantir on the Forbes.com website, and about Open Democracy’s investigation here. Also read this excellent detailed thread on Twitter from Stefan Simanowitz.
Is this another step towards selling off the NHS to a private US company, and who exactly stands to gain?
