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by Aurornis 51 days ago
> In fairness, is this any worse than what Palantir will do with the whole countries NHS records?

I don’t get this trend of seeing bad thing happen and then commenting that other bad thing exists and therefore “in fairness” we should downplay it.

Bad things are bad. Comparing them to other things we don’t like doesn’t make them less bad. I don’t like Palantir either but they’re not intentionally leaking health details so this comparison doesn’t even make any sense.

1 comments

> they’re not intentionally leaking health details

To many, they are. They're leaking information that has been trusted to the NHS to their own databases.

The fact that it's being done under government contract and (arguably) within the law shouldn't immediately make it any less bad.

> The fact that it's being done under government contract and (arguably) within the law shouldn't immediately make it any less bad.

Of course it should, to say otherwise is absurd

what, the NHS shouldn't have _any_ subcontracting? All data must only be held by sacred NHS monks in a vault somewhere?

As long as palentir are holding the data on UK servers, to modern data security standards, and they have a contract to do so, they should be able to

no, they should not, since we already know that the contract won't stop them from using that data for other purposes and other governments. A government should act in the interest of its own citizens, first and foremost, and not pretending to believe a pinky swear by a notoriously bad actor.
Why do you trust the UK government won’t do the same?
That's a catch 22, I mean they literally are using the contractor... So yeah, they're effectively doing it.

The point was that they shouldn't use contractors and keep their citizens data private. Whenever they don't do that... that's an issue. Hence the critique.

That was the norm for some time, it's just being eroded over the years and is basically entirely gone at this point

Not just in the UK for that matter...

Why subcontract with public money to a private for-profit enterprise whose main goal is not the public good?