Except that video is not turning me on
🤦♂️ 100 years of humiliation for the UK.
Let’s see how they like being colonized for once
that’s what happened after WWI, ewrope became a vassal state for the usonian empire
Who’s the collective they?
The British Empire
Starmer might actually be worse than Boris.
Holy fucking shit.
Once they have the data, there’s no turning back.
Paywalled, but I’ll assume the NHS here is the National Health Service in the UK.
“Just don’t get sick bro!”
The prob ofc is, everybody will need healthcare in their life. We are at our most vulnerable when we need it the most.
Here in the US we have had endless breaches of healthcare data. Companies that promise to keep it secure. Ofc they can’t. Even the ones who make a good faith effort. They can’t either! So we get mass breaches, millions of patients. On a monthly basis. Or even more often. Of intimate data. Medications. Dr notes about the patient. Diseases you have.
In my parents day, health info was a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. Nobody could access it from across the planet! Even the gov could not, unless they sent somebody there with a search warrant. Today? It’s open fucking season.
Boils my blood.
I couldn’t even get to the paywall - their cookie consent dialog was halfway off the screen and I couldn’t click “reject”
couldn’t click “reject”
Protip. 90% of the time if you disable JS completely in your browser, that prevents the cookie dialogs. Sometimes prevents other annoyware too.
My fav are the ones where you can click “Accept all”, or “More Options…” and the Options path goes to like 50 pages of confusingly worded separate options that’d take 20 min to figure out them all. Asshole design.
About a decade ago, when I still lived in Britain, the project to keep central copies of GP patient data came and it was possible to Opt-Out.
I expresselly filled the paperwork to opt out of it with my GP, because by then I did not at all trust British Governments (all this was after the Snowden Revelations, plus having been in Finance in the 2008 crash and seen how that was dealt with by both British major parties, I fully believed they were corrupt as fuck) and expected that all that healtcare data would be misused including, sooner or later, being sold out (or even given) to the Private sector.
Here we are now, and lo and behold…
PS: By the way, if I remember it correctly this data was already sold to Google years ago, supposedly “anonimized” but in such a weak and inefective way it was proven it could easilly be de-anonimized.
supposedly “anonimized” but in such a weak and inefective way it was proven it could easilly be de-anonimized.
More info about that idea from Harvard University.
Anonymizing personal info is way harder than most ppl realize. Bordering on impossible when there is other data about those people to use. That Harvard page mentions voter records. But I think more to the massive trove of behavior data that devices capture about everybody now. That paints a very intimate picture of everything most ppl do. Everywhere they go. All their interests. Their moods. Their habits. Their friends group. That is the basis of powerful de-anonymizing techniques. And data broker companies are VERY good at this. They hire incredibly smart data scientists.
I sincerely doubt anyone’s medical data today can remain private. Might be data breaches. Might be de-anonymization. But it will not stay confidental between pt and dr for long.
This one specifically had people’s addresses, so it was reasonably simple to match to people’s identities if you had other data containing identity and address.
Yow. That’s insane.
De-anonymizing data should be so illegal that it’ll get you thrown into a wood chipper.
Kid Starver is on a speedrun to destroy Labour. What a shitbag.
NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform.
The change, first outlined in an internal briefing note seen by the FT, relates to the National Data Integration Tenant, described as a “safe haven for data” before it is “pseudonymised” and transferred to other systems.
The NDIT is an area within the Federated Data Platform, a tool that connects disparate NHS data into a single system, which Palantir won a £330mn contract in 2023 to build.
Under the plan, NHS England has agreed to create an “admin” role, which the briefing acknowledges “permits unlimited access to non-NHSE staff” to the NDIT and the identifiable patient information held within it.
As well as Palantir employees, this could include staff from consultancy firms who have been drafted in to work on the FDP.
The change marks a significant departure from the current practice, which requires any individual working with the NDIT to apply for clear data access for specific data sets.
The briefing document, written by a senior NHS data official in April, acknowledges that granting enhanced permissions could mean there is a “risk of loss of public confidence” when it comes to “safeguarding patient data and ensuring appropriate use and access to it”.
While all-round access was originally intended only for NHS England employees with security clearance, the briefing noted that external workers had requested the same permissions “as it is too inconvenient to apply for all of the necessary individual CDAs”.
It added:
“This is not only about Palantir, hence we have referred to non-NHSE staff, but there is currently considerable public interest and concern about how much access to patient data Palantir/Palantir staff have.”
The note recommends that a cap be placed on the number of external admins with access to the NDIT, which should also be time-limited and regularly reviewed.
Officials confirmed that the recommendation in the briefing note had been accepted in recent weeks but said it would apply to only a small number of non-NHS staff.
Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Commons technology committee, said:
“This somewhat cavalier attitude to data security demonstrated how this whole [FDP] project does not have security by design at its heart. The public will be rightfully concerned that data privacy is not the first concern.”
NHS England has committed to five “data promises”, which include transparency about who can access data and what they can see.
Referencing the pledge, the briefing warned that “being sure exactly who is accessing what patient-identifiable data at any one time” is a top concern.
“The more people have unrestricted access, the less that aim can be met,” it added.
An NHS England spokesperson said:
“The NHS has strict policies in place for managing access to patient data and carries out regular audits to ensure compliance — including monitoring the work of engineers helping to set up the central data collection platform that will track NHS performance and help improve care for patients. Anyone external requiring access must have government security clearance and be approved by a member of NHS England staff at director level or above.”
Palantir’s involvement in creating the FDP has increasingly become controversial because of its work in the US defence sector and immigration enforcement.
Its co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp, has been an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, and some NHS staff have refused to work on the FDP due to ethical concerns about the company.
Supporters of the FDP have praised its ability to bring together operational data, such as waiting lists and operating theatre schedules, and improve patient outcomes.
A Palantir spokesperson said:
“To the NHS, and all our customers, we are designated by law as a ‘data processor’, with our customers “data controllers”. That means that Palantir software can only be used to process data precisely in line with the instruction of the customer. Using the data for anything else would not only be illegal but technically impossible due to granular access controls overseen by the NHS.”
The fact that criticism of this is coming from the LDP, suggests that maybe the best replacement for Keir Starmer probably needs to come from outside the Labor party.
If you get sick they will send a drone to take care of you.
“A terrorist with cancer was killed today after threatening the profits of an innocent health insurance company.”
The UK is just getting worse by the day, Starmer and Labour need to go
The UK-Palantir contract to develop this was negotiated in 2023, before the current government.
It’s true that the conservatives started it all off, but since then Starmer and Streeting have expanded the UK’s relationship with Palantir.
raid against humanity
EU+UK political leadership is a complete shitshow.
The UK is about a decade ahead of the rest of Europe, and not at all in a good way.
Archived page does not work
loads fine for me 🤷
