Shocking story by @PaulLewis & team. @guardian has seen documents showing govt using Peter Thiel’s Palantir’s & NHS patient data to model ‘herd immunity’ week after policy supposedly dropped
theguardian.com/world/2020/apr…
There’s another company at heart of this story too. Meet @faculty_ai. Formerly known as ASI, the ‘secret’ data firm Dominic Cummings hired to do Vote Leave’s data modelling. There’s so much about this work that has never come out. A small fraction here:
theguardian.com/politics/2017/…
This is data nirvana. Now in hands of one company owned by a Trumpian ideologue & another Cummings used in his law-breaking Vote Leave campaign. If you don’t think there is an issue with how this data is being used or where it could end up, you are very very much mistaken
It’s no exaggeration to say that this is Cambridge Analytica’s on steroids. Yes, NHS data is vital for us as a nation to fight this terrible virus but to use these 2 companies with such troubled histories with zero transparency is deeply disquieting
What tender process?? Where was it advertised? Who else bid? Ben Warner didn’t just work on Vote Leave, he worked on general election & then was recruited by Cummings to work at No. 10.
Note also all those references to Faculty’s lawyers. When I researched article on Ben Warner’s involvement in general election, Faculty refused to answer all queries then sent letter from Schillings. Week later, after election, @ShippersUnbound ‘revealed’ his role in @sundaytimes
And as Arron Banks & his brother are so delighting in pointing out, GMG Ventures, a commercial spin-off of Scott Trust, invested in Faculty. It’s a huge testament to the independence of our editorial coverage that it played zero role in how this story was covered
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