According to the public information, bank fees are (or going to be) standardized across the EU's Euro zone. It's in the works for a long time because it's a joint effort and requires a lot of coordination from many involved parties. European Payment Initiative was founded in 2020 but the idea was there since the formation of EU and Euro 20 years ago.
And also it superseeds most of those payment solutions. Wero is based on iDEAL and other european payment systems.
Traditional banks have already been severely disrupted by financial start-ups that only charge low fees. People will switch if they feel the cost pressure.
From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.
Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.
Unless Palantir has code that overrides US laws (the US CLOUD act specifically), they are a US company and there is zero protection from anyone in the US that has (secret or not) subpoena power. Yes, secret subpoena power exists. That includes the NSA, Congress, police, investigative judges, US youth services (yes, really), state legislatures of all states, including some territories, the White House and thus Trump, the list goes on and on and on and on.
Including organizations like NSA and CIA that have already shown they use these powers, classify everything secret, while lying about it even to the US Congress.
FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.
Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.
What does "public" mean? Giving the data to Palantir in this day and age practically guarantees the data will be scraped for US 'security' purposes, particularly the ones having to do with immigration and immigrants.
Palantir provides the software but installs in your cloud or hardware. They rarely exfiltrate the data. So you don’t give Palantir anything (usually).
Edit: I can understand not wanting to use a non-UK company for NHS health. But Palantir isn’t the all seeing bogeyman it’s made out to be. It’s just knowledge graph and AI models which run in your cloud or hardware.
If you give your data to a Chinese company you make your data available to the Chinese intelligence services. Same with most other countries with geopolitical ambitions. I don't see how this is controversial. This is why you only buy IT services from countries you trust.
Could you add substance here? The egregious corruption in the current US administration is something we are all witnessing in real time. This is not rhetoric.
Not to the public, but University hospitals often have researchers trudging through their data. Junior doctors often audit patient data. Palantir isn't the first organisation to look at patient data.
There are a few answers to that but the most obvious reason is quality of work. You can expect a lot more out of a contractor whose billed rate is $250 an hour versus a grad student. The second point is that least in the United States, all government jobs are purely clerical and administrative. The government, as you know it does nothing for itself, except may be law-enforcement. Contractors do everything. Space flight, building the roads, managing construction programs, hauling trash, everything. In this particular case there are “national security“ interests that have inserted themselves into the healthcare domain who want the data and to control treatment. You don’t get to say no to people who with unlimited resources and a “by any means necessary” MO.
The "government does nothing for itseld" thing..... I am not sure thats true. Pretty sure the government is the single biggest employer in the country a d I dont think that even counts contractors
Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.
This comment isn’t as much of an exaggeration as it seems, at least regarding engineering. At a previous job, I was tasked with helping a product line achieve certification to a government standard. The public facing government contact I interacted with was just a middle man with the consultancy, ICF, who actually developed and maintained the standards, to government specifications. Also, those government specifications had significant input from industry.
It's funny how the US administration thinks people like Breton acted ideologically. Brusselocrats are career politicians caring more about their CV than the spirit of their actions. They do populist flashy things, it's not like they'd lose an election or anything. Ban them all you want, you re just buttering their bread , it's another bullet in their CV, a badge of honor.
Then again, Trump has to win the election, and the Bell curve is symmetrical. Sanctioning EU politicians is less like sanctioning elected national politicians, and more like sanctioning artists. No nation was offended
Lots of politicians haven been pro-spying for quite a long time. Lots of people are quite indifferent about it.
The massive shift of communications to digital channels has put mountains of data right there for the grabs, which is extremely attractive for people who want access to all that data.
Certain countries like Greece use surveillance against political opponents. In this case, the PM himself oversaw the spying of the current opposition leader, journalists and others.
There's also lobbying from "security" companies who are pressuring governments to purchase and install their systems, but they require realtime spying of everyone.
Nothing could be better for this generation. They would be forced to the real unregulated internet, where nothing is boring and everything is magic and chaos
Better to just connect the myriad of instant bank payment systems that already exist all over europe than to invent another standard.
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