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Did you read the article? There's no evidence cited in it at all. This comment thread made me think "wow, Palantir must be selling PHI to the mob" or something, and The Intercept has the receipts, but the article simply states that Palantir has a contract to run medicaid billing. It then goes on to say that Palantir also works with other government agencies like ICE (bad), and the Israelis (worse than ICE), and the UK (they've crossed the line now!)

It's entirely left up to the reader to fill in the blanks that whatever is going on with this contract is nefarious and bad.

The Intercept used to do good work, but this article is complete trash. At least the author was self aware enough to reference the 2016 reporting.

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what evidence are you looking for?

there is absolutely evidence a government agency is using palantir. the very beginning of the article:

> New York City’s public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir ... automated scanning of patient health notes to “Increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show.

later it explains:

> Palantir’s contract with New York’s public health care system allows the company to work with patients’ protected health information, or PHI ... Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.

so a government agency is allowing palantir access to private health information to use for other purposes other than research.

again, i dont know what kind of "evidence" you're looking for, but much of the conversation ive seen revolves around those two pieces of the article.

those two pieces of "evidence" i find to be terrifying if it were any data brokerage, but considering what we know about palantir and its founders/leaders its even moreso. and again, it seems entirely appropriate for the discussions to happen from the "evidence" the article puts forward.

the government should not be sharing private health information with private corporations "...for purporses other than research" and it absolutely shouldnt be using those data brokers to sidestep warrantless data collection protections.

if you think the government should be able to amass enormous dossiers on all of its citizens, thats fine, you're entirely within your right to think thats rad, but we're also allowed to think this directional shift is absolutely terrifying.

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Sorry, where? Maybe I've missed something, but the article is just about their health business growing in New York rather than an illegal data backdoors?
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There's no evidence it's just speculation. Microsoft has a contract with the same exact orgs. So does AWS. Anyone with a little bit of common sense would know that. Palantir's CEO and Peter Thiel are not particularly well liked so presumably people are speculating without any evidence at all. Could there be an issue? Yes, absolutely but not just with Palantir but let's not let facts get in the way of a narrative. In any event I think the question of data being shared with the government could be a problem even if the software was made in house and then open sourced by the hospital (which is itself ridiculous to expect but this is HN) because the hospital themselves could provide the data to the government. At this point someone might say "no that won't happen because hospitals are nice and Palantir is evil" or "there are laws" but I am not sure why Palantir would be exempt unless anyone has proof or anything besides a vibes based argument but then we're back to square one.
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was someone arguing there are illegal backdoors?
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