New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK
theguardian.com196 points by chrisjj 3 hours ago
196 points by chrisjj 3 hours ago
It seems like letting a company like Palantir anywhere near private medical data is a pretty bad idea. I am happy NYC is doing this.
Palantir builds software that customers use to work with their own data. Custody of the data remains with the customer.
This is like saying a hospital that uses Excel is handing over data to Microsoft.
This isn’t accurate, Palantir business model includes mass surveillance for military/security purposes; if a company is concerned with privacy should think twice before handling it to Palantir, even if with all the assurances they might give in terms of data governance.
This is like saying a Swiss bank would share your secrets because shady people use Swiss banks. No. Confidentiality is literally built into their business model. Getting caught sharing customer data is one of the fastest ways for their business to crumble.
How many times are we gonna have to see businesses get caught sharing customer data before we learn to not just trust them?
You’re calling people who critique Palantir “borderline Q-Anon” ?
While you yourself think Palantir’s products are “like Excel” ?
They are not. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...
while I understand the meaning here, modern Excel does handover data to Microsoft (via Copilot)...
Users choose whether to use Copilot, and are free to decline it's use.
How do I decline it?? I keep clicking no, hide, not interested, cancel, etc. but it keeps showing up and activating...if I had a nickel for every time I clicked it on accident in Azure because a layout shift moved it under my mouse when trying to press a button I would have a lot of nickels. It even showed up as an app on my phone because I guess the Office 365 entry got hijacked...
Your Entra Admin like your Google workspace admin can publish or remove features from user availability.
I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.
They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.
Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.
They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-os...
Do you work for palantir?
No, but I am curious why this one company gets some much hate. I can get being politically opposed to the conservative politics of some of its founders, but the vast majority of conservative-founded companies don't get nearly as much criticism. A lot of it is seriously borderline Q-anon levels of conspiratorial talk. Just look at the comment in this thread insinuating that Peter Thiel is going to assassinate people with orbital weapons.
The people controlling Palantir are openly anti-democratic. They see technology as a means of controlling and ruling the common folk. They said so, repeatedly, in public, of their own volition.
Alex Karp is a deeply unlikable human who talks about how his software is used to kill people, and that he wants to drop a lot of fentanyl-laced urine across all the negative reporters.
Also he has stated that critics should be sprayed with fentanyl laced urine.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/02/17/palantir-piss/
Why should we feel good about him running any company.
Your point is well taken, though it's worth pointing out that literally yesterday Palantir was co-awarded a contract for building orbital weapons systems [0].
The broader point is Palantir's specific confluence of:
- access to granular, non-anonymized data across industry silos
- its chairman's specific pro-authoritarian mission (so pointedly so that the Catholic Church felt the need to make a specific rebuke a few days ago [1])
- a regulatory environment in which its monetary risks are arguably minimized if it takes the broadest possible reading of e.g. HIPAA's law enforcement exceptions that mention "written administrative requests" [2]
- documented concerns about governance [3]
Those concerned with this confluence are far from conspiracy theorists, and may be quite rationally interested in protecting e.g. the public reputation of their hospital networks, and ability to service - to say nothing of their desire to protect the privacy of their patients.
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-03-24/and...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/world/europe/peter-thiel-... - https://archive.is/2EOXa
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-doe...
[3] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/letter-to-palantir-techn...
In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.
That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all
Most Epic products aggressively isolate data. The majority of instances are run on-premises, and even those hosted on cloud platforms are single-tenant. They have a good record for data security and privacy; afaik all Epic data breaches were actually caused by infiltration of other customer systems.
Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so' (theregister.com)
76 points by fauigerzigerk 6 months ago | 7 comments
Why are so many entities dealing with Palantir? They are a poison pill for customers.
Palantir is a glorified IT consulting company. You tell them "I want a system to manage patient records" and they will dispatch a team of engineers fresh out of college to build it for you while charging top dollar. They are able to get government & military contracts because of lobbying and influence, but generally everything you see about them online is marketing.
Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting company...
Cambridge Analytica was much more successful as a marketing company, vastly overstating their influence and impact
They don't have in-house talent to implement what they want. The same reasons they used to hire Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC. Palantir is one rung up from those places when it comes to talent/ability to deliver.
+1. Think of it like a consulting shop that can deliver customized software instead of just slide decks and excel workbooks.
Which customers? Outside of the HN bubble, very few consumers know or care which entities are using Palantir.
Dear UK government, keep Palantir the hell away from my data.
when private company is deeply embedded in public health systems it is just dangerous
Palantir is an AI firm now? Thought it was a data collection/spyware firm.
spyware
If they're not a spyware company then they really super duper picked the wrong name. Maybe they were just going for evil, in which case ... well I'm glad NYC hospitals have dropped them and I hope many, many more companies and organizations choose the same path.
Their main product is just consulting and PowerBI but for government. So much hysteria online!
Their CEO is a crazy person who seemingly wants to tear down democracy
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Thiel is pro-dictatorship as near as one can tell. Karp probably isn’t sane enough to evaluate
Hysteria? Have you listened to Karp? Palantir pushes some pretty shit-tier BI noise to clueless executives (it's actually uproarious the mythology that has built around that company), and this weird creep talks like they're the masters of the universe.
Thiel is another incredibly bizarre creep, and he sits as the chairman of the board. Both are very tightly associated with the Trump crime syndicate and the US government, which increasingly is the world's #1 threat, and should be treated as equally dangerous.
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The US is undisputedly the world's #1 threat. Like who do you think is even in the running?
Massive military that has bombed ten or so countries in the past year, overthrown a couple more, threatened close allies such that they're getting blood supplies ready and bombs to remove runways. Enormous nuclear arsenal, all in the hands of self-dealing criminal halfwit pathological liar with malignant narcissism as the country flushes down the toilet. A "Department of War" leader who is a simpleton alcoholic clown who rails off "give me tough guy speeches" that he got from ChatGPT, gloating about blatantly illegal -- both in international and US laws -- war crimes, including murdering people in boats just by rebranding them "narco terrorists". A governing party that increasingly is stocked with INSANE fundy nuts who declare that global warming isn't real because the bible didn't mention it, and who salivate about unleashing armageddon. The country is basically lawless at this point -- a busted plutocracy -- and the securities industry has become farcical it is filled with such grift and absolute lawless fraud.
No one holds a candle to that dangerous nuthouse. North Korea, China, Russia...no one is an iota of a danger that the rogue, war-criming United States of America is.
And the "best" part is that we're entering the era of the worst nuclear proliferation in history because of the utter insanity we've seen in the US. I suspect many "own the libs" Americans aren't going to like what inevitably comes next.
Please stop with the ad hominem attacks.
Uh...what? Do you know what an ad hominem is? Bizarre.
I directly described the United States of America as it is today. This is just fact, and to the entire rest of the world, America is a busted idiocracy that represents by far the greatest threat to world peace.
EDIT: Oh forgot to mention that the US is directly and openly involved in political interference in many of its allies. Alberta in Canada is a target of a massive US operation right now. Just about every European country. Which is pretty ironic given that the US is basically a fractured pseudo-country where one half of the country hates the other half, and that by all rights should be split up.
Boy, with friends like these, we'll all hope that China's nukes hit their marks with good accuracy.
Palantir can install a data backdoor at anytime with their software. If you haven't noticed that businesses are openly violating data privacy you aren't paying attention. I don't have trust in our judicial system if Trump pardons criminals everyday.
NYC schools just passed some AI guidelines as well. No training on student PII data, no final grades, etc. Unfortunately that's a pinprick for the behemoth.
J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel's Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.
A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.
I'd be concerned if any of the parties involved were halfway competent. This is a grift for taxpayer dollars, nothing more.
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[self redacted as the above comment was obviously a troll]
> Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics
They work with law enforcement agencies and help them process data they legally collect into other government databases. Their main product is merging data from various databases and adding a UI layer for analysis.
Basically, Palantir is a data integration company that works for government and larges businesses under contract. Some data they get hired to work on includes surveillance data and military intelligence collection.
I think he is implying that their enterprise contracts are all on prem and airgapped? Seems unlikely to me they do that for all their customers but they likely do for the government ones anyway.
It's not necessarily airgapped but yes. Air gapping is a bit much for hospital data, which after all does have to be readily accessible to the people working at the hospital or group of hospitals.
There's a bizarre conspiracy going around that Palantir is some all-seeing force in the world trying to turn everyone into mindless drones. In reality, it's just a company that—like it or not—has been relatively successful at securing massive contracts with the government and major corporations.
In a healthcare context, internal pricing and patient data are heavily protected by law. If Palantir were as guilty of surveilling your medical data as you allege, that would be tremendously illegal, and companies much larger and more influential would have strong legal grounds to sue it into oblivion. If you think Palantir has a tight grip on the government, consider the influence of the health systems it works with—some of which are the largest employers in their states. The idea that an all-powerful company can control the government doesn’t make sense if smaller companies, which donate less, are somehow exerting unchecked control over larger ones.
Of course, most of these concerns stem from two things: (1) its approach to autonomous warfare and (2) concerns about immigration surveillance. Autonomous warfare is coming, whether you like it or not. Palantir’s role in that is not related to its work in the commercial sector—unless you're suggesting they’re holding back potential revenue by not selling highly advanced robotics to corporate clients. Concerns about immigration surveillance are also somewhat overstated because, again, Palantir legally cannot use data from its commercial work (unless one of its clients severely mismanaged their contract). In that case, it’s really the U.S. government you should be criticizing — not the contractor simply trying to make money.
> ah? Then explain how they do surveillance and analytics (from the above article contract). The base necessity for doing this work is... data, and the data is somewhere, stored.
It's on prem at the customer.
I know nothing about palantir in particular but typically these software stacks have a bunch of random crap in them to deal with fetching data from other system's the customer has.
The law is generally a bad proxy for whether or not society approves of xyz commercial behavior
I don't think people are accusing Palantir of criminally misusing the data. The government rewrites the laws around what these analytics firms are capable of, and as such Palantir operates in that space. Whether or not it's "illegal" doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is creepy Big Brother shit.
Also bullshit that they don't store data.
>Like it or not, there really isn't any other company at this scale capable of doing the sort of work Palantir
That’s only making European entrepreneurs salivate at all of that sweet EU funding they can suck up to replicate PLTR in service of their sovereignty initiatives.
Europe is currently lagging on the cloud front, the AI front and even the SaaS front. They can't even wean themselves off of MS Office ffs, after all the shenanigans Microsoft and the US have pulled against them. I have no hopes of the EU building anything that can replicate even 25% of Palantir.
They only have to replicate Palantir marketing and garnish it with a bit of nationalism. Not like the government is good at getting its money's worth in the end.
And not forget hardware. All they have is meaningless leaders with zero vision. My dumb AI claw tool has better view of the world than they do. They might as well be replaced by those AI agents. Probably better outcome that current
"controversial"
Everyone knows what's going on, but also everyone is too afraid to stand up for some reason.