Technology

The BMA said its opposition to Palantir’s involvement in the NHS was a matter of good governance, not ideology. “If Palantir’s software is being used to target individuals in immigration enforcement and is being deployed in active conflict zones, then that’s completely incompatible with the values we uphold in the delivery of care,” said Dr David Wrigley, the deputy chair of the BMA’s general practitioners committee. He warned patients would be alarmed and could choose to withhold information from their doctor if they did not trust the organisation processing their data or there were fears about what the data might be used for. The Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said the interoperability between the data systems Palantir provides for health and defence was “profoundly worrying”. The Conservative MP Kit Malthouse wanted to know if a military could target particular individuals with particular characteristics by using Palantir’s ability to process a large pool of data. Mosley said: “We provide an enormous amount of control and governance to the organisations that use our software for that purpose to manage precisely the kind of risks that you’re talking about.” Malthouse said: “That sounds like a yes”.