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NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns
- QuadmasterXLII 7mo agoPalantir is under immense economic pressure to deliver this integration at high quality on time. This incentive structure, combined the publicly traded nature of the company, risks corrupting its core founding goals of embodying the evil of Sauron on earth and hurting as many people as it can, as badly as possible. However, Thiel is an extremely competent, mission focussed leader and I agree with the doctors: he will get this program back on track mission-wise without pissing off shareholders too much. (</s>? Maybe? hard to say tbh)
- imdsm 7mo agoThe reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Money is burnt at an alarming rate and the companies taking on these contracts are incompetent at best. If staff don't want to work with it then they're not fulfilling their roles. What if any of us took a job and then refused to work with Microsoft or [Insert company] due to personal reasons? We'd be jobless.
- Angostura 7mo ago> The reality is that no program so far has really been successful within the NHS. Could you be a bit more specific? No IT initiative at all? No attempt to create a national data spine?
- frogperson 7mo agoPeople arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Your comment implies any behavior against the interests of a corporation is somehow a sin. This is such a gross take.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago> People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Modern HR culture is working hard to address this terrible failing. </s>
- newfriend 7mo agoThey are allowed to have thoughts and free will, and a company is allowed to fire you for not doing your job. It's not a sin, it's just business.
- crimsoneer 7mo agoI imagine this is the argument police officers used when they refused to use body cameras.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 7mo agoAnd yet - when I go my GP they enter and lookup data on the computer there which is linked to national system.
- twobitshifter 7mo ago> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023 to collate operational data, including patient information and waiting lists. That contract value is ridiculous - how many full time staff do they have on this project and what rates are they charging? How can some say ‘operational data collection’ is worth a third of a billion to NHS over the alternatives of using a third of a billion on patient healthcare and actual medical research? This needs an investigation around how this contract was ever approved.
- user3939382 7mo agoI assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.
- imdsm 7mo agoThere's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution
- codeduck 7mo agoThere is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin... More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.
- howerj 7mo agoI find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.
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- i_love_retros 7mo agoWhat were NHS execs thinking signing a contract with palantir? Either they are completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by (would be very concerning) or they are corrupt and were bribed.
- chrisjj 7mo agoOr those execs are ignorant about their staff's concerns.
- imdsm 7mo agoReductive take
- stevesimmons 7mo agoThere have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir. Definitely not a conflict of interest...
- i_love_retros 7mo agodown voted by all the tech bro billionaire wannabes on hackernews no british person would down vote this - at least not one with any integrity
- basket_horse 7mo agoOr, the non politicized take is that they think the software could improve the data landscape of the NHS, which, if we are bring honest, has a lot of room for improvement.
- georgemcbay 7mo agoI am an American so the plight of the NHS has no direct impact on me, but I'd argue that Palantir is a fundamentally political company and thus there is no room for non-politicized takes.
- MeteorMarc 7mo agoIt seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
- imdsm 7mo agoI suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles. I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing. Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever. So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many. There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers. Just my 2p
- forgotusername6 7mo agoInternal restrictions are such that even aspiring software Devs find hurdles to doing basic automation. I know someone who wanted to use python, yes just use it, and it took months to be allowed to do that on an NHS machine.
- jjgreen 7mo agoDoes it run on Windows 95?
- philipwhiuk 7mo ago
- krona 7mo ago> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023 The total contract value was £182,242,760 over 5 years. For context that's Roughly 0.0002% per year of NHS budget. https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/2e8c61c0-faab-4f99-ae69-b00df6bae165?origin=SearchResults&p=1 https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/2e8c61c0-f...
- TimK65 7mo agoThat would imply that their annual budget was £1.8e14, which I seriously doubt. Even if I assume that you meant 0.02%, which is equal to 0.0002, that would put their budget at £1.8e12, which I am also strongly inclined to doubt.
- gnfargbl 7mo agoThe NHS's actual current annual budget is £195.6B in 2025/2026 [1]. The contract value declared at the link given above is £182M over 5 years. So: 100 × ((182/5)/196000) = 0.019% Which, to me, still seems too high a number for a data management function: I make it about 1000 persons-worth of per-capita GDP. [1] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/financial-performance-update-6/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/financial-performance-u...
- basket_horse 7mo agoI think you would need a lot more context to say if 0.019% is too high. If this platform is driving real operational improvements and is the core software backbone, then it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 7mo agoA contrarian view although I do dislike contracting with foreign companies for roughly similar reasons: Palantir's technology looks good and I think it probably works. Most things don't work.
- cynicalsecurity 7mo agoBrits: left EU, drifted to US that treats them like crap. A wise choice, what can I say. "We send the EU 350 million pounds a week. Why not send it to Palantir instead?"
- OJFord 7mo agoI know they're similar numbers, but all you're really doing is making this look cheap, because it isn't a weekly contract. (Not that the comparison would make much more sense if it were, apples and doorframes.)
- cynicalsecurity 7mo agoSpoiler alert: Brits were not sending the EU 350 million pounds a week. That was a bullshit number made up by Brexiteers. Crazy, I know.
- mike_hearn 7mo agoYes they were and it wasn't made up. The objection was that the number is gross but some of that money the EU chose to spend in the UK. But that's irrelevant to this point because the EU didn't spend any of that money on healthcare. It went on the commissions priorities and projects, not the NHS. So the claim that it could be spent on the NHS instead, but only on leaving, was correct.
- graemep 7mo agoA lot of EU countries are using Palantir and dependent on US big tech too
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mustHaveIRON 7mo agofire them, plenty would be happy to have the job
- ssgodderidge 7mo agoFor those wondering, FDP stands for Federated Data Platform > Our mission for the NHS Federated Data Platform is to provide a secure, flexible system that connects data across NHS organisations to improve patient care, streamline services, and support informed decision-making.[1] [1] : https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-data-platform/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-d...
- pratyushsood 7mo ago[dead]
- heraldgeezer 7mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 7mo agoWe've banned this account for posting several egregious comments in the past few days. (This one isn't the worst; I'm just commenting here because it's the most recent.) This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts and continuing to post in blatant breach of the guidelines. Please stop wasting everyone's time with this practice. Very few people see the comments.
- chrisjj 7mo ago> This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts How do you know this is the registrant of all?
- heraldgeezer 7mo ago[dead]
- heraldgeezer 7mo ago[dead]
- tonnydourado 7mo agoAs an interesting linguistic coincidence (or not), FDP is a commonly used acronym in Portuguese, standing for "filho da puta", literally, "son of a whore", but semantically it's approximately "asshole/jerk/dickhead".
- tonnydourado 7mo agoP.S.: Fuck Palantir.
- tjpnz 7mo agoDo I as a patient get to opt my medical information out?
- shevy-java 7mo agoAny government that hands over citizen's data to a private entity, even more so one that is primarily foreign, should be investigated for being a traitor to the public. That's a general statement, not solely confined to the Palantir guys. They kind of gave it away by chosing that name alone already - damn thieves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr).
- crimsoneer 7mo ago... are we saying government should never use any corporate to deliver services? Not Outlook? No Google Workspace? No AWS? I am so confused.
- _slih 7mo agopalantir is a US company subject to the cloud act. patient data from 123 hospital trusts is now one mlat request away from us law enforcement regardless of where the servers sit.
- orochimaaru 7mo agoOnly if Palantir owns the servers and the storage. A lot of what Palantir does is on a clients infrastructure. The entire platform is installed on client infra. At least the one we have where I work is.
- chrisjj 7mo ago> Only if Palantir owns the servers and the storage. I believe no, MLAT scope is not limited to servers/stored owned by the target entity. If it was, MLAT would be routinely defeated by targets hosting on AWS, for example.
- orochimaaru 7mo agoHow would Palantir extract the data if nhs specifies the security infrastructure?
- crimsoneer 7mo agoSend Palantir engineers to vault over the data centre wall and extract it on a USB stick like James Bond, presumably.
- beanjuiceII 7mo agofire them easy decision
- smashah 7mo agoWhy do Epsteinist Companies feel they have the right to not only billions of dollars of citizens in other countries, but also their health record data?
- IAmBroom 7mo ago"Epsteinist Companies" What does that neologism mean?
- smashah 7mo agoCompanies related to the network of Epstein associates. They seem to have zero respect for people's rights and privacy. True enemies of freedom and children. We should not appease these people with incredulity when they are directly and specifically and correctly called out for destroying society.
- stuaxo 7mo agoCompanies whose board contains Epstein associates, who appear I the files a significant amount of times.
- cmiles8 7mo agoThe Palantir brand has become incredibly toxic and, from what folks report, the software just isn’t very good either. A lot of smoke and mirrors hype not matched by substance.
- asdff 7mo agoFrom what I've heard their money product is taking all the various government data systems and indexing them for search on one platform. Doesn't seem like much of a moat, but I guess that is what the bribes are for.
- cmiles8 7mo agoIt’s not. The moat is just that it’s challenging to get into that world as a vendor, but by all indications and observations folks cite the tech is pretty meh by 2026 standards.
- dariosalvi78 7mo ago> While Louis Mosley, the executive vice-chair of Palantir in the UK, maintains that such campaigns are ideologically motivated and could harm patient care, this is EXACTLY why it is of outmost importance to own those critical systems, and not delegate them to foreign companies, especially if from a country explicitly hostile towards Europe
- graemep 7mo agoToo late. The NHS is already heavily reliant on AWS. Not the only ones either. As things are Europe (except Russia and a few others) is utterly reliant on Americas. Read up on how difficult things became for the ICJ judge the US sanctioned. If the US ever blocked almost any European countries access to online services they economy would collapse.
- StacyRawls 7mo ago[dead]
- aimemobe 7mo ago[flagged]