alt Hacker NewsNHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns
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A 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.
It 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.
Any 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).
For 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-d...
As 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".
Do I as a patient get to opt my medical information out?
Brits: 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?"
muh ethics
But they had no issue with any other db?
What 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.
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fire them, plenty would be happy to have the job
> 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-f...
Palantir 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)
> 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.