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Letters: The government must stop allowing foreign companies to have access to our sensitive data, writes Ian White . Plus a letter from Bill Cawley
The UK cannot become dependent on foreign AI technology that can be switched off at short notice, says George Williamson, head of the Alan Turing Institute (Report, 10 October). The growing opposition to Palantir, an American company, having government contracts that give it access to sensitive data are all part of the same issue. The UK does not have digital sovereignty.
This is not a theoretical problem. The US government imposed targeted sanctions on the international criminal court, stopping all digital services to certain individuals. This could happen to a country.
Even if you use European email and cloud services, our computer operating systems require constant software updates. This is not just to add new features. There is a constant race between the good guys patching the software bugs and the bad guys trying to gain entry to your computer using those same software bugs.
Recently, Holland and France took active steps to break the near monopoly of big Amercian tech by laying the foundations of a nationwide IT ecosystem that they would control. The UK needs to do the same.
Ian WhiteCheltenham, Gloucestershire
• The concern about the NHS’s dependence on Palantir (Palantir’s Tom Watson says ‘mob rule’ must not dictate awarding of government contracts, 9 October) is justified, but the £330m contract is a symptom of a wider habit. Whenever the government wants joined-up data, it buys one large platform from one supplier – and such projects have a long record of overrunning, costing far more than planned and locking the buyer in.
There is a working example of the alternative: the world wide web. It does not require everyone’s data to sit in one place or run on one company’s software. It simply defines how data is requested and transferred.
The NHS needs the same: an open specification for exchanging records, plus a registry of where each patient’s data is held. Any authorised clinician could then assemble the full picture of my treatment, while each hospital or practice chose its own software supplier. Specialist firms could still compete to analyse the data for planning and research – but none would own the plumbing.
The NHS already has the beginnings of this in its interoperability standards. Why do the money and political attention go to a single proprietary platform rather than to making open standards mandatory?
Bill CawleyLudlow, Shropshire
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