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Say No to Palantir in the NHS
- anonzzzies 10mo agoEveryone should say no to palantir anywhere, especially outside the US.
- DFHippie 10mo agoI assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.
- anonzzzies 10mo agoThanks, fixed.
- rvz 10mo agoYou 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.)
- exBarrelSpoiler 10mo agoAs 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.
- biophysboy 10mo agoI think the difference is that Palantir is significantly more focused on federal contracts, particularly those related to defense/surveillance.
- heavyset_go 10mo agoLarge tech companies are defense contractors now.
- nurettin 10mo agoWDYM "now"? Companies that get large enough get contracts. Even apple sold power macs iphones and ipads to us mil.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoI'm throwing out my iPhone and moving to Tibet.
- XorNot 10mo agoCompanies 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.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoIs there a time they weren’t? Google got their first DoD contract in 2003 from DARPA.
- stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
- willtemperley 10mo agoAbsolutely. We should not contract any of these companies and use British companies instead.
- jaccola 10mo agoI'm sure AMSTRAD could knock up a few data centres for a couple o quid
- aprilthird2021 10mo agoWhen one domino falls, it will cause many to fall at once
- moogly 10mo agoDon't let the best be the enemy of the good.
- 151212j0j 10mo agoOf course that's the goal, but stopping new contract is 1 step toward the goal my friend, got to stop whining and take baby step. You are saying stopping new coal mine means that everyone need to stop heating now and freeze to death this winter.
- outside1234 10mo agoAs a worker in one of the companies above, I can tell you that we aren’t willing to do just “whatever” to win contracts. We have real responsible AI reviews etc. We would not just hand over data to the US government. It doesn’t seem that way at Palantir.
- anonzzzies 10mo agoBut the issue is, and I am not someone saying we should or can throw everything out, that if the US gov demands it, you have to hand over the data right? If your HQ is in the US? Palantir, for me, is worse because of what they are and their communications as you say, but all of these, when compelled by the courts, have to hand over right?
- whimsicalism 10mo agobest not to do business with any foreign country then. neo-isolationism becomes global and all it took was a second Trump term.
- esseph 10mo ago"all it took was a total loss of international confidence"
- philwelch 10mo agoWhy stop there? You should also boycott the investment firms behind these tech companies, like Y Combinator, and their Internet forums like Hacker News.
- mrcartmeneses 10mo agoSo we can’t take it seriously until the problem is already solved? I think the worry regarding Palantir is that it is explicitly and openly fascist rather than just doing fascism on the side
- next_xibalba 10mo agoWhy?
- mr_toad 10mo agoWe don’t know who else is watching.
- discordance 10mo agoPalantir is inside Coles supermarkets in Australia. I've stopped going to Coles because of that. https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Partners-with-One-of-Australias-Leading-Retailers/ https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
- left-struck 10mo agoWow the business jargon is dense in this one. What a pile of garbage.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoWhy?
- jschrf 10mo agoSurveillance Capitalism
- darubedarob 10mo agoThey are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".
- ddalex 10mo agoI keep hearing about these Palantir magic abilities but I have not seen any positive example where Palantir made an actually actionable predictions that are not common sense
- outside1234 10mo agoAnd inside the US too!
- tbrownaw 10mo agoSo what are they using this software for, what's the proposed alternative, and what makes that alternative work better for their use case?
- megawatts 10mo agoThey 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-sharing-contracts-with-palantir.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...
- harvey9 10mo agoDid you read the article? Adult social care dashboard not vaccine data. Mozaic just handled migration and is not the host. NHs FDP (Foundry) still has the vaccine data last time I checked.
- adolph 10mo agoHealthcare systems often use Foundry for organizing data. It's a complex problem and Foundry has a good toolset for the job. https://www.palantir.com/offerings/health/ https://www.palantir.com/offerings/health/
- biophysboy 10mo agoAs 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.
- ggm 10mo agoHealthcare 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?
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago> the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. LOL I've said the same thing! Turns out I do have something in common with Peter Thiel. The difference is he's speaking in the context of US which makes his comments on the NHS just disgusting hypocrisy.
- lingrush4 10mo agoClicking "no thanks" on their cookie banner does absolutely nothing. What a sleazy website.
- MoltenMan 10mo agoClicking anything on the banner does absolutely nothing Hanlon's Razor wins out here I think
- ifh-hn 10mo agoUblock origin zapper kills it perfectly, though clearly it shouldn't be needed.
- mijoharas 10mo agoOh that's great! How did I not know about zapper?! (Usually on desktop I remove annoying things in inspector by just deleting the HTML element manually, but on mobile I usually just closed the site. Glad to have a nice solution now!)
- chrisjj 10mo agoNot reproduced here, where it dismisses the dialog.
- mijoharas 10mo agoOn Firefox Mobile (Android) neither button works.
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- MoltenMan 10mo agoI 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?
- m4ck_ 10mo ago[flagged]
- p0w3n3d 10mo agoEveryone here is writing as if it was obvious, but I need more details. Could you please share any links on the subject?
- KaiserPro 10mo agoKarp memorised oswald mosley's speech for capitulating to hitler: https://nypost.com/2025/11/18/us-news/why-eccentric-palantir-ceo-alex-karp-feels-left-by-the-left/ https://nypost.com/2025/11/18/us-news/why-eccentric-palantir... At best thats wierd, at worst he's an actual fascist (context: Oswald created and ran the british union of fascists in the UK, married the diana mitford with both Goebbels and Hitler present. )
- mlrtime 10mo agoAhh yes, the left's version of "If you don't agree with us on everything you are a fascist." Boring.
- filleduchaos 10mo ago"If you don't agree with us on everything" and it's someone whose wedding Goebbels and Hitler attended? Interesting.
- 10mo ago
- notepad0x90 10mo agoI 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.
- karlitooo 10mo agoMostly 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
- seydor 10mo agoMy main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments. Make the data public if you want to see progress
- harvey9 10mo agoFDP 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.
- seydor 10mo agoWhat 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.
- harvey9 10mo agoThis is not a good faith argument
- yakshaving_jgt 10mo agoCould you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
- tormeh 10mo agoIf you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
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- dikozaken 10mo ago[flagged]
- uxcolumbo 10mo agoCan you provide more details?
- chopete3 10mo agoThis is could be the reason the commenter is trying to convey. Palantir helps Israel with war in Gaza/Palestine. Friend of any enemy is an enemy. That group is asking for help cause harm to that Friend.
- questionableans 10mo agoThis 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.
- NicoJuicy 10mo agoWhy would any non US country pay for a dependency anymore on US military products under the current administration...
- MagicMoonlight 10mo ago[flagged]
- badgersnake 10mo agoNieve, or wilfully in denial?
- ifh-hn 10mo agoI know next to nothing about Palantir or the CEO or his mate Peter other than what I've read in this thread and some of the links. From what I can tell the objections are all political in nature, and whether people like what the company has done previously. In the context of the NHS contract I've seen little to suggest the software is going to make anything worse... How could it?
- barnabee 10mo agoMy objection is that Palantir are close to a US regime that if not actually evil is at times indistinguishable from it. Combine that with people like Peter Thiel (who has publicly stated beliefs that are deeply incompatible with free and democratic society) in positions of power/influence there, and opening up our citizens' and/or government's data to that company feels particularly risky[0]. So yes, I guess it's "political", but at some level everything is. We don't get to "just" make technology. [0] Honestly, right now I would put most or all large US tech companies in the same bucket (though for now, less vehemently so) as large Chinese or Russian companies when it comes to sharing nationally important data or assets. We have to assume they're potentially compromised by a government that (by its own statements) can no longer be assumed to remain friendly. Palantir just happens to be both very visible and particularly risky in this regard.
- ifh-hn 10mo agoI would say, in my opinion, that it's better in the US than in China/Russian hands. The US at least seems most aligned with the UK in terms of political freedom than the two communist states. I'd also say that the NHS has a proven track record of failed IT projects, so if this company can improve the situation then I can't see the issue. Unless of course the UK gov mess up the contract, which can't be ruled out. At some point you have to look at this objectively without politics bias.
- pxoe 10mo agoWonder if they'll also have an AI kill chain for healthcare. Would be a neat little trick to reduce costs.
- estearum 10mo agoFor all practical purposes this already exists and that's because practically speaking it has to. Obviously a health system can't deploy infinity money to save the life of every person who is sick.
- pxoe 10mo agoWell yeah, US healthcare system is already pretty close to just being an AI kill chain as is. Maybe they could make some cool ads about how they're ruthlessly optimizing that as well, with a little more of a mask off kind of sociopathic approach that they do.
- estearum 10mo agoEvery healthcare system has mechanisms like what I’m describing.
- bArray 10mo ago> NHS England is rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir – a US spy-tech firm that has supported mass deportation in the US and enabled genocide in Gaza. Forget politics, not everything has to be framed this way. This is simply something that should be done in-house. What if the UK's relations with the US break down, or there is a cyber attack on the infrastructure? > One of Palantir’s founders is also openly against the NHS. Peter Thiel claimed it “makes people sick” and said that the British people love the NHS because we’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? Do we have to be politically aligned with absolutely everybody at all times in every part of life in order to be able to function? > With the government putting NHS trusts under pressure to adopt the software, we need to act right now. If you want to keep Palantir out of our NHS, send an email to your local trust and Wes Streeting, secretary of state for health. This Wes Streeting guy has a high chance of being the next UK Prime Minister in early 2026.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught? I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.
- scaramanga 10mo agoBillionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting. The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
- KnuthIsGod 10mo agoSo the US security apparatus will have DNA data on all UK citizens. Nice... What could possibly go wrong with giving UK citizen data to ICE, NSA, CIA, Trump, Trumps friends, Trumps friends corporations, Trump's friends foreign political connections, donors to the above etc...
- z0ltan 10mo ago[dead]
- dcollect 10mo ago[flagged]
- exasperaited 10mo agoPalantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK. I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles. Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.
- hopelite 10mo agoExcuse my delivery of bad news, but the time to say no would have been when the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. The Fox has been in the henhouse for several decades now, asking politely or just mumbling "no" under your breath is not going to do anything at all. You may as well just save yourself the further humiliation of inevitable defeat with that mentality. People are going to say no to the implementation of a system with direct, root ties to the "intelligence" (we really need a better term for that) triad, when the peasants are totally dependent on the centralized, ruling class controlled health services of the NHS??? Hello? Does no one else notice that the peasants are in a a dungeon, in a cage in that dungeon and shackled to the wall in that cage in the dungeon? And they're going to say "no"???? People clearly have either gone insane and are lying to themselves, or they have absolutely no idea what the reality is that they are experiencing all around them out of delusions or stupidity, or both.
- tialaramex 10mo ago> the dystopian British government installed CCTV cameras everywhere. Um. You realise the vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are owned by private citizens and organizations other than the government right? The only government owned camera I can think of within a mile of here is a traffic camera watching a river crossing. The government has about 300 cameras total in my entire city.
- hopelite 10mo agoYes, it has morphed over time through collaboration of the "intel" community interfacing with industry. Is it safe to assume that mass surveillance and control is fine with you as long as it's private companies doing it and providing the data to the government? I believe it is one of the bases for why one side of the political divide makes the claim that this administration is somehow uniquely fascist, even though they are categorically wrong, but are responding to he ensnaring and strapping of corporations to the service of the government.
- tialaramex 9mo ago
- dev1ycan 10mo agoThe more access Palantir gets the more it becomes what I've feared for years, an unified database where they can use any or all of the following: Location(s) Phone number(s) Ip(s) Email(s) document(s) comment history(ies) so on and so on to gather every single thing you've ever done on the internet, it's very dystopia like and I cannot believe that it's legal outside the US for palantir to even operate in.
- zipy124 10mo agoPeople seem to forget a healthcare system is an important part of a nations security apparatus. In a time of war, casualty numbers and information is very valuable, and so allowing access to this data to be controlled by a company (palantir) funded by a foreign nations security services (funding by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC fund) is short sighted. Even if you think Palantir is a wonderful company, this should concern you for the reasons above.
- design2203 10mo agoAnything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk. The U.K. has been stripped and laid bare of its assets since the era of privatisation. The U.K. needs to wake up and start innovating to take back control.
- franktankbank 10mo agoI think the only reason this is done is because we are in an era of exceptional illegal kickbacks. Unethical/illegal behavior has become so normalized that if you aren't actively working for a party who is doing it/doing it yourself you are losing.
- LightBug1 10mo ago>>Anything that is core to the function and well being of a state, being owned by a foreign nation poses a national security risk. You mean like water? ... I believe we're the only 'developed' country in the world to have sold off / privatised it's water. It's all we do. Sell our country down the river for the benefit of a few wankers. I signed up to the link in the original post, but don't have that much hope. We'll sell our grandma if it'll mean we get a 50p voucher or save 2 more minutes of our day.
- design2203 10mo agoYes that’s exactly what I mean. I’m working on stuff that I can’t say too much about. But let’s just say there is a way out from this - but it will require the smartest minds and folks starving for change to come together and create the change we want. Sometimes an environment that creates a desperate need for change can be a good thing. It’s not going to happen via politics. It has to come by being creative from the outside in.
- rishabhaiover 10mo agoWhat are some valid sovereign alternatives NHS can use?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Flere-Imsaho 10mo agoThey could always use Fujitsu/SCL * * see the Post Office scandal
- 7492632928 10mo ago[dead]
- crimsoneer 10mo agoI'm really confused as to why the Good Law Project thinks this is their fight. NHS gives contract for cloud database to US cloud software company. This is not that shocking. I'm not clear what they outcome they're looking for .... Using Databricks instead and getting slightly shittier health outcomes so we can be smug we're not connected to Peter Thiel?
- cbeach 10mo agoThe Good Law Project is a left wing activist organisation, and Palantir is a conservative-aligned company. It really is as simple as that. If you’re wondering why these HN commenters are so passionately against Palantir, just take a cursory look through their comment history and you’ll understand. People are tribal.
- prajaybasu 10mo agoHad to scroll way too much for the truth.
- tacitusarc 10mo agoThere is something ironic about the “reject cookies” option not working on that site.
- justinhj 10mo agoI can't read the article because the cookie dialog is broken and won't proceed. Chrome on iPhone
- justinhj 10mo agoOh, I see. Also broken on desktop but you can still read the article without accepting the cookies, which makes the thing kinda pointless? Their post endpoint for cookie handling is broken. Giving 403. Request URL https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php https://notopalantir.goodlawproject.org/wp-admin/admin-ajax.... Request Method POST Status Code 403 Forbidden Remote Address xxxxxxxxxx Referrer Policy strict-origin-when-cross-origin payload set_user_consent val positive security xxxxxxxx
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- yatopifo 10mo agoThe UK doesn’t realize how much working with a US company is going to cost them in the long run. They don’t realize yet the US is not an ally.
- djohnston 10mo agoFriend of a friend was working on a Palantir NHS integration a few years before the pandemic, so I'm pretty sure this ship has sailed.
- trimethylpurine 10mo agoFrom what I can tell, it's just a data integration platform. This article seems like a smear campaign.