Hello!

The meaty story this week focuses on Palantir, and its ties to various UK government bodies. With the rollout of an FCA pilot using real data this month, Palantir now sits across our health, policing, military, and financial data.

In other news we look at a trial for banning social media, a man who is being sued for creating both AI music and its listeners, and a feel good story from the world of game development.

And for the blog spotlight this week, we nerd out on how far technology has come, all through the lens of increasingly flashy websites.

Let's dig in...

Top Story

Let's talk Palantir...

A quick summary

Palantir Technologies are a US-based data analytics and AI company primarily known for their military intelligence work. It was founded by Peter Theil, who you may remember from LT3 #19 also backed the Persona ID verification platform.

As of this month, Palantir holds well over half a billion pounds worth of contracts with UK public bodies, including in healthcare, in defence, in local policing, and most recently in financial regulation.

This is causing growing concern among people with common sense, and also with politicians as they call for the FCA data access to be revoked.

We'll get into all this in a second, but just one more thing. As this is a newsletter written by a nerd, you should know that a palantír is an artifact from JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings legendarium. They are "seeing stones", used for long distance communication and surveillance. Most famously, a palantír was used by series antagonist Sauron as a means of corrupting others to his nefarious ends, and to read the minds of lesser individuals to gain information.

Where it all started

Back in pandemic days, Palantir got their foot in the door when NHS England approached them to build the COVID-19 Data Store. Sitting on top of Palatir's Foundry software, it brought together information from sources such as NHS Digital, the UK Health Security Agency, the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre, into one central place to be analysed.

This, essentially, is what Palantir specialise in. Bringing data from multiple sources (even if they seem unrelated) and creating a picture of the landscape that can be used to make informed strategic decisions.

The next steps - the Federated Data Platform

Perhaps now realising the power of connected data, following COVID the NHS looked to build a system that would bring together all of it's many disconnected systems into one data store - ostensibly to improve the quality of care for patients by better, quicker, more informed decision making. In November 2023, Palantir was award the tender to build the FDP, for £330 million over seven years.

Seems like a good idea. And Palantir, with their expertise in data wrangling, and their proven record with the COVID-19 Data Store, appear to be the right outfit for the job. Right?

The thing is, there's two issues here that a lot of people cite. People like the British Medical Association and its 200,000 doctors, or the fine people over at Good Law Project. The first is that collecting all of that information into one place makes for a very attractive honeypot for potential attackers. Or, indeed, for our very own Home Office. Putting all of that information in one easy to access place does more than just allow clinicians to more effectively treat patients. It also allows for the police to pull together information that they ordinarily wouldn't have access to. And if all this seems a little bit of a reach, let's take a quick glance at what Palantir are helping our friends over the pond do...

Palantir and ICE

Back in January of this year, 404 Media broke a story about how the US's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using an app to map neighbourhoods, create dossiers of information on individuals, and then use that information to create a "deportation heat map". The dossiers would pull in information from medical records, financial information, and even social media activity.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from context, the app was built and operated by Palantir. It is in fact just the latest in a range of tools that Palantir has built for ICE, and ICE is not the only department of the US Government Palantir holds contracts with. Palantir now sits across a vast array of individuals' data, often without the data subjects' knowledge. Much of this data is being collected for one purpose, and used for others. A bit like if you'd gone to the doctors with an embarrassing rash, and then your GP had given that information to your local radio station to make an ad for fungal cream, with your name in it, to be broadcast for your drive home. Only it's not like that at all. Instead there are people with big guns and even bigger egos kicking your front door in at 4am and dragging you to a concentration camp.

All of this sits alongside the concern that there is a considerable blurring of lines between the technology Palantir is developing for use in war zones, and the technology being used domestically.

The mosaic effect

But what does this have to do with the UK? And doesn't it really feel like we've taken a hard swing away from a story about a tech organisation getting access to the FCA?

There's a concept in data science called the mosaic effect, where combining data can reveal sensitive information not apparent in the individual datasets. With Palantir already sitting across our healthcare and policing data, providing access to data from the Financial Conduct Authority was seen by many as a bridge too far.

While government spokespeople assure us that Palantir's software can only be used to process data "in strict accordance with the instructions of [the FCA]", others are more sceptical. The data included in the trove of information Palantir will get access to will include recordings of phone calls, emails, and social media trawls. While the FCA apparently considered pseudo-anonymising the data, they opted not to in the end, claiming that "using real data was the only worthwhile test", despite their own guidelines stating that pilot projects such as this one should use synthetic data.

All of this means that Palantir will be adding to its already considerable coffers of data on UK citizens.

What else is happening in the world of tech?

Social media bans and digital curfews to be trialled on UK teenagers

Since December last year, Australian under-16s have been banned from using social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and X-formerly-known-as-Twitter. Now, our own government is exploring ideas for a similar system, with a new trial. 300 teenagers will have their access either revoked entirely, blocked overnight, or capped to an hour of use a day, in order to measure the impact.

There is widespread support for increased controls and protections regarding social media, with it's impact on kids hard to ignore. this trail will be running alongside an ongoing consultation and continuing debates in Parliament.

US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI

In one of the first successful prosecutions of AI-related fraud in the music industry, a North Carolina man has plead guilty to defrauding music streaming services of millions of dollars of royalties.

The courts argued that this was money stolen from real artists, in the form of lost royalties. What's interesting about this case though is that this isn't technically true. There were no real listeners either. Most of the listener figures were pumped up by bots. So this was fake music, listened to by fake people, that somehow generated over $1 million in real revenue a year for 7 years.

In other AI / Law related news, you might also be interested in this story about defendants relying on the "Interest on Debts (Scotland) Act 1985". Unfortunately for them, the Act does not exist, having been hallucinated by AI. Spoiler alert: the defendants did not win their case.

Two indie games with the same name accidentally launched days apart, so the devs averted disaster by working together

"I made back what I put into the game in the first 24 hours" - Chase_P, Neon Polygons

The world of tech isn't all cut throat. When two developers released completely different games with the same name just days apart from each other, they saw the funny side and decided to lean into it. Creating a discounted gaming bundle, they let buyers purchase both games at a discounted price. As a result, both sets of developers believe they made more from the sales than they would have going solo.

Blog spotlight

The 49MB Web Page

In what could easily have been a rant about the insanity of how bloated and ad-laden webpages have become (it's probably the narrative route I would have taken), software engineer Shubham Bose instead takes us on a little journey through the ages, to really show you just how ridiculous the state of play is.

This singular page [of the New York Times website] represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text.

I remember (definitely totally legally) downloading albums in my teenage years. It would take ages, and you'd have to do it after 6pm (because the internet was free then). The idea that the same amount of information is being downloaded to my device for every page of your average news website you go on, is mad. Its a really good reminder of how much more impressive our technology has become, but how little actual benefit we as consumers get as a result.

It's a bit of a nerdy deep-dive into how websites work, but I think well worth a read.

That's it for another week of LT3!

Thanks for reading, and I'll pop back next week.

Will