IT Essentials: In the shadows

Secrecy is no way to run the NHS

The UK risks farming out even more power to a private US firm

News broke this week that Palantir, the US data mining firm founded by Peter Thiel, is expected to have won the tender for the Federated Data Platform: software that will bring together vast reams of data for use across the NHS.

NHS chiefs are privately concerned about the move; not necessarily the technology, which has been needed for years, but the company deploying it.

Speaking to Computing on condition of anonymity, one IT leader told us that Palantir had been working its way into the health service for a long time. In a previous role they had been asked to sign a supplier contract, which upon digging turned out to belong to Palantir - operating under a different name.

Such is the negative feeling the controversial company generates that the NHS feels the need to hide its involvement.

Palantir, for its part, admits that it has got its media strategy wrong in the past. In a meeting earlier this year, shortly after we published this editorial, a spokesperson told me that operating in the shadows, on reflection, hadn't been the right approach. The firm is apparently committed to being more open in the future.

That doesn't seem to hold much weight with MP David Davis, who this week gave the company short shrift in Parliament over its privacy record.

But even if Palantir had an impeccable reputation, there would be a question about its public sector involvement.

As John Leonard asked last month, do we have too many eggs in too few baskets? The UK is, in a nutshell, beholden to the USA. Tech companies like AWS, Microsoft and Google (and Oracle, IBM, Salesforce - the list goes on) more or less run our critical technology infrastructure.

Do we want to give another private US company sweeping control over citizens' medical data, too?