Having awarded a major contract to (controversial) data firm Palantir, a growing number of NHS staff are refusing to work with the firm's tools for ethical reasons, with wider passive resistance to its deployment.
One manger said: 'People are saying, ‘I refuse to work on this software. You have to find something else for me to do’... They’re calling it a workplace adjustment. [as] if you were disabled & needed a different desk, they’re literally treating it like that'!
@ChrisMayLA6 I was really pleased to see this.
I wrote to my (labour) MP saying I wanted to opt out of my data being given to Palantir (or anything associated with Peter Thiel) and got a very wet response about 'your data won't be hacked' (as if that was the issue...) I pointed out that having the big fox in the henhouse, keeping the other foxes out, didn't reassure me!
I didn't get a further response, but it does seem I'm not the only one in expressing such discomfort!
I've heard variations of this said before and while it might be a neat political deflection it completely misses the point.
MPs are mostly, sometimes laughably ignorant of technology but you'd hope that they'd make an effort to keep up with some of the more obvious technical trends and public sentiment.
I suppose the question is to what degree our MPs are aware of the global geopolitical implications, and by extension whether they themselves are conflicted.
Running a country using software and infrastructure provided by a foreign government raises some serious questions about national sovereignty.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Roth Child
Reg