In May 2003, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and four co-founders launched the data-mining company Palantir. Named after an all-seeing crystal ball in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and initially partially funded by the CIA, the company has secured a series of contentious but lucrative public sector contracts in the US, covering predictive policing, migrant surveillance and the development of battlefield software. But 17 years later, it is Palantir’s work with the British government that is now under scrutiny.
In late March, the BBC revealed that the company, which is valued at more than £9bn, was one of several businesses, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the London data analysis company Faculty, that had been enlisted to build the Covid-19 “data store”. The project, which draws on 1,000 data sources per day, including anonymised Covid-19 test results and patient information, was conceived by NHSX, the National Health Service’s digital transformation unit, to assess and predict demand.
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