Leaked docs reveal the extent of UK's cooperation with Faculty and Palantir on a “Covid-19 datastore” to power the previously announced NHS pandemic dashboard
The disclosure lands mid-crisis, before the government published the actual NHS contracts that June (contracts covering all four vendors), and it prefigures the fight that resurfaced in 2023 when Palantir and Accenture won the £480M patient-data overhaul over doctors' and privacy campaigners' objections (the federated data platform award).
First-order effects
NHS and Faculty face immediate pressure to explain the datastore's governance — who can query patient-level data and under what legal basis — since the leak shows the collaboration ran deeper than the March announcement implied.
Second-order effects
Privacy campaigners and doctors gain a documented precedent: the emergency-era datastore becomes exhibit A in their opposition to the later federated data platform procurement, where patients cannot opt out of data sharing.
Third-order effects
If crisis-speed vendor integration becomes the template, national health systems risk consolidating around a small set of big-data firms — with Palantir moving from pandemic volunteer to holder of a multi-hundred-million-pound NHS data contract within three years.
The trend: Emergency data partnerships struck during Covid are hardening into permanent national health-data infrastructure, with Palantir converting crisis access into long-term government contracts.
Tech companies are using large amounts of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation that is part of the gov's response to the #COVID19 crisis One of the firms, Palantir, is known to have built tech that enabled #HumanRights abuses https://www.theguardian.com/…
UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response Not only is the Guardian's trust an *investor* in this company but the editor sits on the board that invested in it, and now it's mining confidential patient data. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Shocking cock up story by @PaulLewis about the owners of the @guardian who own a company that's using patient data to model ‘herd immunity’ and old Codswallop @carolecadwalla is livid...obviously her editor @KathViner is fine with this (she sits on the board of said company) lol …
“Whitehall source said they were alarmed at the unprecedented amounts of confidential health information being swept up in the project, which they said was progressing at alarming speed and with insufficient regard for privacy, ethics or data protection.” https://www.theguardian.…
Shocking story by @PaulLewis & team. @Guardian has seen documents showing govt using Peter Thiel's Palantir's & NHS patient data to model ‘herd immunity’ week after policy supposedly dropped https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response with help from Palantir, the US big data firm founded by the rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
“Technology firms are processing large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation that is part of the government's response to the coronavirus outbreak” https://twitter.com/...
Lots of useful details in this Guardian piece on the NHSX data store Two questions: 1. This data use is entirely defensible, so why didn't NHSX just come out and explain what they were doing at the beginning? 2. Why did Faculty communicate via lawyers? https://www.theguardian.com…
We've seen documents revealing how the American big data firm Palantir and British AI company Faculty are helping build an “unprecedented” UK government database to help respond to the coronavirus outbreak. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...