Duncan McCann: Palantir puts surveillance at the heart of the NHS

The NHS is the UK’s crown jewel, a beloved institution built on principles of care, equality, and safety. But the health secretary Wes Streeting is pushing for a deadline early next year for NHS trusts to hand the framework for our health records to Palantir, a US company founded with money from the CIA.

While the NHS urgently needs better data systems, it’s obvious that Palantir is the wrong partner for the job. The spy-tech firm has worked with US agencies accused of separating children from their parents and forcibly sterilising women. StopWatch has condemned its predictive policing technology for targeting marginalised communities. And the UN special rapporteur on human rights identified Palantir as complicit in war crimes and “profiting from genocide” in Gaza.

The long list of ethical red flags isn’t the only cause for concern – the company’s own leadership is openly hostile to the NHS. Co-founder Peter Thiel has called British affection for the health service an example of Stockholm syndrome, claiming the NHS “makes people sick” and urging the government to “rip the whole thing from the ground and start over”.

The British Medical Association deemed the firm “completely incompatible with the values we uphold in the delivery of care”, and health workers have repeatedly staged protests demanding the £330m contract is cancelled.

Palantir’s software isn’t even up to scratch. NHS workers who have piloted the software say that compared to existing systems it’s clunky, demoralising, and a waste of public money. And while NHS England claims data will be pseudo-anonymised, re-identification is easy. Palantir may even retain intellectual property rights to improve its algorithms with NHS data – profiting from our health records to refine its tools for surveillance.

As if this combination of clunky software, corporate data extraction and surveillance risk wasn’t enough, NHS England has backtracked on its commitment to allow patients to opt out of Palantir’s software – even though nearly half of all adults in England say that if they could, they would.

The rollout of Palantir’s software risks embedding a culture of state surveillance into the fabric of our public health service. Health records contain some of our most private and sensitive data, so it’s not hard to imagine what could happen if they fall into the wrong hands. And with the far right on the rise, a centralised data platform could become a target for state overreach and authoritarian control.

With hard-won freedoms under threat as never before, we must stop this Palantir rollout before it’s too late.