The Nectar project offers ‘advanced data analysis’ using a wide range of sensitive personal information

A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.

Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.

Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.

The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.

Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.

  • BoycottPro@lemm.ee
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    2 hours ago

    Why pay money to a company who wants to destroy you? No government should give a dime to Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Thiel is an evil sociopath who may have murdered his boyfriend. He also wants to basically abolish government. A government giving money to Palantir is like a snake eating its own tail.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      30 minutes ago

      James bond movies have always predicted the future to a certain extent. In car GPS, Self-Driving vehicles, really sharp hats, the media’s abuse of power for political gain, obnoxious tech Bros building mansions in stupid places.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    20 hours ago

    Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the Press never talked about the gigantic surveillance aparatus in the UK ever again.

    So I have zero surprise that they’re doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.

    • atlien51@lemm.ee
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      8 hours ago

      What’s with the UK being a totalitarian shithole? Like…they tout bs about democracy and freedom all day long. So what gives their agenda over the past couple decades?

      • supernight52@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Moderates think that “both sides” have good points, but should meet in the middle. They work with whoever guarantees comfort and power. They poison society.

  • seven_phone@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Simply a way to pump public tax money into the private sector and will quietly be dropped when the well runs dry in the way the National Programme for IT pumped £12bn into an NHS patient record system that was not even close to fit for purpose and ignored by staff.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      2 hours ago

      -minus the viruses, zombies and enhanced mutations. just Peter thiels fantasies come true, he also his own island of harem of men too.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      2 hours ago

      USA is already using Palintir for LEO already. i higly suspect the facial recognition they use for red traffic light violations also use this or something similar.

    • Kaboom@reddthat.com
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      1 day ago

      Snowden bro. He already showed that the five eyes countries all spy on their citizens.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I presume that, up until this point, the UK wasn’t intentionally paying them for the privilege