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Whilst Bozo has us all distracted...

Postby rebbonk » Sun Apr 04, 2021 8:21 pm

Tory government refuses to give details of its renewed NHS contract with this ‘Big Brother’ firm

The Johnson-led government is refusing to publish further details of an NHS contract with a US firm. This firm has been embroiled in controversies relating to intelligence gathering for several years.

Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel is a board member and major investor of Facebook and was a member of Donald Trump’s transition team.

In the UK, Palantir has been awarded a £23m extension of its NHS datastore contract, but this was scrutinised by openDemocracy. This resulted in the government reportedly agreeing “not to extend Palantir’s contract beyond COVID without consulting the public”. openDemocracy also said that the government agreed “to engage the public, via patient juries, about whether firms like Palantir are appropriate for a long-term role in the NHS at all”.

However, openDemocracy also argued that: We still need full transparency on the Palantir deal: the government continues to refuse to lift key redactions on what data is being fed into Palantir’s datastore. We need to know that the public consultation they’ve promised is far-reaching, not just a box-ticking exercise.

In May 2020, The Canary reported on the datastore project that would access a range of data sources. These include but aren’t limited to:

111 and 999 logged data.
Supply chain coordination.
Shielded patient list.
Public Health England negative test results.
Patients listed as frail.
NHS electronic staff records.
Coronavirus (Covid-19) related death information.
Coronavirus hospitalisation in England.
Surveillance systems.
Care home beds.

UK government blog Healthtech stated that Palantir would provide “the software, Palantir Foundry, that powers the front end data platform”.

According to Big Brother Watch, the NHS dataset includes:

personal contact details (including name, personal email address, home address, home telephone numbers, emergency contact details),
personal details (including gender, nationality and place of birth)
work contact details (including work email address, work department, work telephone number, user IDs, work location details)
employment details (including job title, job duties, manager/sponsor, working hours, employee number)
any other personal data that might be useful for the nature and purposes of the Agreement


Source and a little more: https://www.thecanary.co/investigation/2021/04/04/tory-government-refuses-to-give-details-of-its-renewed-nhs-contract-with-this-big-brother-firm/
Of course it'll fit; you just need a bigger hammer.
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