Privacy alarms raised as Palantir gets access to sensitive UK financial data
Thanks to a new three-month contract awarded to Palantir by the Financial Conduct Authority, the US AI analytics company will have access to a trove of sensitive personal information on UK citizens, raising significant concerns over privacy.
The FCA confirmed to The Guardian that it had awarded a three-month contract to the US AI company which would see it gain access to highly sensitive UK financial records.
The goal of the contract is to help improve the efficiency of the FCA in policing fraud and other regulatory contraventions in the UK.
It is expected that Palantir will bring its cross-industry Foundry artificial intelligence platform to bear on this dataset, ingesting the data it is provided to provide digital intelligence that will help guide the FCA’s enforcement procedures.
Amongst the data that will be granted to Palantir are case intelligence files; lender reports on suspected frauds; consumer complaint information; and recordings of phone calls, emails, and social media posts.
Providing such sensitive data to Palantir has raised privacy concerns among many in the UK, including Hickman & Rose partner Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay.
“When the FCA carries out an enforcement investigation, it has powers to compel firms to hand over vast quantities of data,” he said.
“We could be talking about hundreds of whole email accounts and full financial records. Many innocent people will be caught up in that and the data may contain bank account details, email addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information.”
“If you ingest that data and use it to train an AI system, there are very significant privacy concerns. There should be serious confidentiality requirements regarding what Palantir does with the data,” he added.
Palantir’s growing access to British data
This is not the first time concerns have been raised over the growing reach of Palantir into the UK and the awarding of contracts that grant the company access to sensitive personal data.
Palantir’s technology has been deployed in controversial environments, including in warfare across the Middle East, and its software has been used by governments and militaries with alleged links to human rights abuses.
Just earlier this month, a comprehensive report was published by Health charity Medact which warned against the adoption of the Federated Data Platform by the NHS.
The Federated Data Platform is operated by Palantir and established in conjunction with the UK government, which has encouraged NHS trusts, ICBs, and NHS England to onboard the platform and allow it to analyse health data on a national scale.
Its purported purpose is to improve the efficiency of the NHS across the country and to help those running the health service to make better decisions based on more complete data. However, Medact warns that the confidential information available to this system could result in data-driven abuses of power by both Palantir and the UK government.
In warning of the risks of Palantir accessing UK health data, Medact cited the risk of participating trusts and NHS England being indirectly linked to Palantir’s alleged human rights abuses, as well as concerns over the ability for pseudonymous patient data to protect patient identities from the US company’s data processing systems.
