The Guardian view on NHS records: patients are not raw material for big tech | Editorial

Ministers should end Palantir’s contract before medical confidentiality is sacrificed to Silicon Valley’s appetite for public dataAlarm bells ought to have rung when it emerged last month that Palantir engineers could gain “unlimited access” to identifiable NHS patient data. Such sensitive medical information was only supposed to be available either to someone involved in a patient’s care or with the patient’s informed consent. NHS England’s new position appears to have changed that, extending access to private companies because it may make data processing easier. Convenience is not a basis for undermining medical confidentiality.Nicola Byrne, the government’s national data guardian, clearly