Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies Inc., pauses throughout a information convention in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday, Nov. 18, 2019.
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON — A marketing campaign is being launched to attempt to cease U.S. tech large Palantir from working with the U.Ok.’s National Health Service.
The “No Palantir in Our NHS” marketing campaign —launched at an event on Thursday — comes after Palantir partnered with the NHS on a Covid-19 “Data Store.” The challenge was designed to assist the federal government and well being service use information to observe the unfold of the virus.
Foxglove, which describes itself as a tech-justice non-profit, is main the marketing campaign, whereas over 50 different organizations engaged on civil liberties, anti-racism, migrant justice and public well being have additionally backed it.
“We got dozens of organizations to realize and agree that this company has no place in the NHS in the long term,” Cori Crider, the lawyer who co-founded Foxglove, instructed CNBC on Wednesday.
Palantir, which has been criticized by privateness campaigners and human rights teams on a number of events, declined to remark when contacted by CNBC. A spokesperson for the NHS didn’t reply.
What is Palantir?
Founded in 2003 by a number of tech entrepreneurs together with tech billionaire Peter Thiel — a Facebook board member who reportedly donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — Palantir sells software program that is designed to assist private and non-private organizations to research big portions of knowledge and pull out significant patterns and connections.
Since its inception, the $45 billion publicly listed agency, has supported spy businesses, border forces and militaries, with the finer particulars of contracts usually saved a intently guarded secret.
In April 2018, Bloomberg revealed an article headlined: “Palantir Knows Everything About You.”
Named after the fictional “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” Palantir has been linked to every part from efforts to track down undocumented Americans to the development of unmanned drones for bombings and intelligence.
“Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed,” Crider stated.
Clive Lewis, a U.Ok. Member of Parliament for the Labour Party and one of many marketing campaign’s backers, accused Palantir of getting an “appalling track record.”
“It’s built its business supporting drone and missile strikes, immigration raids and arrests, not the delivery and care of medicine,” Lewis instructed CNBC. “It’s got a questionable agenda and I think that will have a negative impact on patient trust, particularly among minoritized communities who may feel a threat from big government.”
Palantir — which has been attempting to develop its European enterprise in recent times — has a significant presence in London’s Soho neighborhood, with a whole bunch of workers throughout a number of workplaces within the space.
Covid-19 Data Store
The Covid-19 Data Store challenge, which entails Palantir’s Foundry information administration platform, started in March 2020 alongside different tech giants as the federal government tried to gradual the unfold of the virus throughout the U.Ok. It was offered as a short-term effort to foretell how greatest to deploy assets to cope with the pandemic.
The contract was quietly extended in December when the NHS and Palantir signed a £23 million ($34 million) two-year deal that enables the corporate to proceed its work till December 2022.
The NHS was sued by political website openDemocracy in February over the contract extension. “December’s new, two-year contract reaches far beyond Covid: to Brexit, general business planning and much more,” the group stated.
The NHS Covid-19 Data Store contract permits Palantir to assist handle the information lake, which accommodates everyone’s well being information for pandemic functions.
“The reality is, sad to say, all this whiz-bang data integration didn’t stop the United Kingdom having one of the worst death tolls in the western world,” stated Crider. “This kind of techno solution-ism is not necessarily the best way of making an NHS sustainable for the long haul.”
Patient information is “pseudonymized” earlier than it’s processed by Palantir’s software program as a part of an effort to guard affected person privateness. The information administration method entails switching the unique information set, with an alias or pseudonym. However, it’s a reversible course of that enables for re-identification sooner or later if obligatory and some have questioned whether or not it is sufficient. Palantir could argue that it is not within the affected person information itself and that it solely gives the platform that enables the NHS to research the information.
While Palantir is processing the affected person information, the NHS stays the information proprietor, limiting what Palantir can do with it.
Pivot to well being
There have been some indicators that authorities urge for food for limitless spend on safety has began to wane and Palantir could have misplaced a few offers in consequence, Crider stated, pointing to a report in The Guardian that highlights among the difficulties the EU’s regulation company had with Palantir’s software program.
Crider believes the agency has been looking for new sources of presidency contracts past safety in consequence. “They hit on a new possibility, which was health data,” she stated.
The firm was reportedly lobbying officials from the U.Ok. Department of Trade in addition to well being executives again in 2019. But it struggled to safe any contracts.
When the pandemic hit, nonetheless, the legal guidelines modified in order that information sharing was accomplished in a compulsory means and for the primary time in U.Ok. historical past everybody’s information was pooled into an enormous lake. Procurement guidelines had been additionally reportedly modified. “Palantir pounced and they managed to get in,” Crider stated, including that there was no bid or aggressive tender.
Palantir’s curiosity in well being was highlighted once more on Thursday when it emerged in a Financial Times report that the corporate has taken a strategic stake in British well being agency Babylon as a part of a $4.2 billion blank-check deal to take the start-up public within the U.S.
Babylon CEO Ali Parsa instructed the newspaper that “nobody” has introduced among the tech that Palantir owns “into the realm of biology and healthcare.” Parsa, whose app gives quite a lot of well being care providers to 24 million sufferers, added: “Their knowledge of healthcare can overhaul what we could do [together]. We wanted to take … the day to day biometrics of the human body and be able to construct a more pre-emptive image, by building a digital twin of each of us.”
A boy runs previous a mural supporting the NHS, by artist Rachel List, on the gates of the Hope & Anchor pub in Pontefract, Yorkshire, because the UK continues in lockdown to assist curb the unfold of the coronavirus.
Danny Lawson | Getty Images
Crider believes the U.Ok. is at an inflexion level on the subject of well being information.
From July 1, the NHS is planning to pool the total medical histories of 55 million sufferers in England right into a single database that can be accessible to tutorial and third events for analysis and planning functions. Patients have till June 23 to choose out. Campaigners stated Friday the “data grab” violates affected person belief they usually’re threatening to take legal action.
“The British public need to realize that we are now coming into a period where the future of the NHS health data, and the health data settlement of this country, is now kind of up for grabs and up for debate,” Crider stated. “Companies have seen it for a while. Palantir don’t want to monetize the data they want to monetize the infrastructure, but there are other companies who absolutely do want to monetize access to the data.”
