Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies Inc., stops briefly throughout a press conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Monday,Nov 18, 2019.
Kiyoshi Ota|Bloomberg|Getty Images
The U.K. federal government has actually ended a questionable data-sharing arrangement with U.S. tech company Palantir following criticism from personal privacy advocates.
The Department of Health and Social Care released a tender in August to move its Adult Social Care Dashboard from Palantir to a brand-new system called EDGE, which has actually been developed by U.K. defense huge BACHELOR’S DEGREE Systems.
“The future UK Health Security Agency Architecture … is seeking to move away from reliance on third party data analytics platforms and software,” the tender checks out.
“DHSC wishes to migrate from the current Palantir solution to the EDGE (Environment for Data Gathering and Engineering) system. This system was established and developed by BAE Systems for DHSC (and it) was progressed at pace during the pandemic.”
The tender was won by London- based IT specialist Mozaic Services, who will get ₤100,000 ($138,000) for finishing the migration, according to public records. The task begun onAug 18 and runs tillSept 30, which is when the agreement with Palantir would have immediately restored.
News that the agreement had actually been ended was initially reported byBloomberg The Department of Health and Social Care and Palantir did not instantly react to a CNBC ask for remark.
Founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, an investor with a seat on Facebook’s board, Palantir supplies its information analytics platform to federal government departments, spy companies and services worldwide.
It saw an increase in need for its software application throughout the coronavirus pandemic as countries tried to draw insights from health information. Britain, for instance, utilized Palantir’s innovation and proficiency to attempt to comprehend the big amounts of Covid-19 information that it gathered. It was granted a two-year agreement inDec 2020 that is yet to be ended.
Palantir states client information is “pseudonymized” prior to it is processed by the software application as part of an effort to safeguard client personal privacy. The information management strategy includes changing the initial information set with an alias or pseudonym. However, it is a reversible procedure that enables re-identification if required, and some have actually questioned whether it goes far adequate to safeguard individuals’s personal info.
A project was released in June to attempt to stop Palantir from dealing with the U.K.’s National HealthService “Their background has generally been in contracts where people are harmed, not healed,” arguedCori Crider, the attorney who co-founded Foxglove.
Clive Lewis, a Labour celebration member of Parliament and among the project’s backers, implicated Palantir of having an “appalling track record.”
“It’s built its business supporting drone and missile strikes, immigration raids and arrests, not the delivery and care of medicine,” Lewis informed CNBC. “It’s got a questionable agenda, and I think that will have an negative impact on patient trust, particularly among minoritized communities who may feel a threat from big government.”
Palantir likewise has agreements with Britain’s the Cabinet Office and the Ministry ofDefense
