alt Hacker NewsPeople 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.
Replies
This doesn't scale, though. It can work if you're a superpower or a bloc, but most countries don't have enough resources to each run their own cloud, mines, energy production, and food production.
We don't need to look further than to Europe and the Ukraine war (wrt. gas etc) to see short-sighted decisions biting people in the ass. Or America, where the Roe v. Wade overturn caused peoples trust in healthcare apps to suddenly be weaponized against them using subpoenas. Short-sighted trust in the status quo hurting people isn't an abstract concept, it happens all the time.
My Christmas wish is for decision makers to do like I was told when I learned how to drive: Keep the eyes far ahead on the road, not right in front of the car.
But Palantir is a software company. Do you feel similarly about the NHS using AWS/Azure/GCP? Do we want it all on some on prem homemade stack?
Anything 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.