Palantir, a tech firm based in Denver, Colorado, that specializes in developing and deploying software platforms, particularly for data analytics and intelligence, won the biggest IT contract in the history of NHS England to integrate data into a central repository. The NHS is the National Health Service, which is the publicly funded healthcare system in England. In a 448 million dollar (330 million pound) deal lasting 7 years, the healthcare status of individuals will be consolidated. President Trump wants Palantir to have access to the personal information of Americans, to collect and analyze their data... Click Here.

Palantir was recently awarded a 100 million dollar contract by the United States Government. It's not the first time the U.S. government has done business with Palantir, as they are involved in various sectors, including the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, Immigration, and so on. The owner of Palantir, Peter Thiel, who had partnered with Elon Musk for PayPal, has an ideology that suggests homelessness "is a feature to increase the value of the higher-end real estate in the city." He has also harped on anti-statism. 

Considering Theil's thought process, whereby the disenfranchised are an "inefficient redistribution (of wealth) strategy in some weird, perverse logic," allowing him access to people's sensitive data could be frightening. Peter Thiel was a major contributor to the Trump campaign as was Elon Musk. Trump praised Theil as someone being "ahead of the curve." Alex Karp is the co-founder and CEO of Palantir and he has an interesting outlook as well. Why these people are hellbent on getting access to the data of individuals is mysterious. Some foreseeable pitfalls are the potential to manipulate certain systems including, but definitely not limited to, voting and jury selection. "The federal government has many different systems of records, tax records, health records, voting records, whatever," said Bernard Chao, a data privacy law professor at the University of Denver. "Palantir, in theory, could put them all together and create a massive database with all the information the government has on everyone." The 1974 Privacy Act was designed to prevent something exactly like this from happening but appears to have been usurped. The aspirations of Bond villains seem less sinister, in part because they are fictional and these guys are real. Safeguards are being circumvented that were established in the best interests of the people. To their credit, law enforcement and physicians, for that matter, could benefit by having access to certain attributes of a person.