alt Hacker NewsLondon Mayor Blocks Palantir
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I think a good consideration here is how would the outcry be if it was a Chinese company being woven into governmental and national health systems.
The only politicization of technology here was done by the Palantir CEO.
His spokesperson said Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.
I wander if they'd care to further elaborate on that.
I'm wondering how this will effect the Palantir London office, which is their biggest European office. Local employment has often been a pawn in deals like this (see e.g. Microsoft & Munich), so I'm positively surprised to see a major with a spine here.
I posted this 5 hours ago and confusingly only received 4 upvotes:
Sadiq Khan blocks £50M Met police deal with Palantir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221296
>A recent Met police trial of Palantir’s AI to monitor staff behaviour...
To be fair, the Met should get a little credit for applying Palantir to themselves first.
My understanding of Palantir's actual, technical offering is profoundly boring: a hosted platform that connects to existing diverse sources of data and organizes them according to well-defined (by Palantir's FDEs) useful schemas. I have developed this impression through actually building a product on the Foundry as well as several rounds of interviews. Frankly that is profoundly boring. The anti-Palantir propaganda, portraying them as this all-powerful Skynet software, is as much a part of their marketing as anything else.
On the other hand, their effectiveness appears to be less in question: the article above claims that Scotland Yard found hundreds of police officers to have been abusing their posts in various ways through use of the Palantir system. I am not a fan of corrupt cops, so I think this is good. Similar stories exist elsewhere, like a 68% reduction in 48-hour mortality at a Tampa hospital through deployment of Palantir's anti-sepsis monitoring tech.
Thus I arrive at the conclusion that this decision is ultimately a loss. Khan's legal standing appears to rely on them not investigating other potential suppliers—I'm not sure that there are any, and "develop these simple data systems in-house" is a bad option because if they could have they would. I suppose ultimately I don't think that Palantir's "bad vibes" among constituents should impact governments' desire to be effective in the programs they purport implement.
We're going to need to send people to prison when this is all said and done if we're ever going to get other countries' business back.
Excellent news.
Brilliant, no longer a Londoner but I really think Khans done amazing compared to his predecessors.
His alternatives look bleak and elitist, I would not be surprised in the slightest they reverse this.
I don't understand how Palantir managed to sell their services outside of the US, given their deep ties to CIA, political positions and involment with US goverments.