Excerpts from https://www.thedailybeast.com/fema-tells-states-to-hand-public-health-data-over-to-palantir?ref=home

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency urged health officials in “all states and territories” to provide “daily” updates on ventilator availability for the novel coronavirus directly to the data mining giant Palantir, according to emails shared with The Daily Beast and confirmed by FEMA.

Palantir, co-founded by key Trump ally Peter Thiel, signed government contracts last month worth approximately $24.8 million to provide the Department of Health and Human Services with data-management software to track health-infrastructure deficiencies and forecast where future needs will emerge, through a platform known as HHS Protect. The company’s tools integrate a staggering 187 data sets containing information on everything from hospital inventories, medical supply chains, diagnostic and geographic testing data, demographic stats and more.

Those data sets do not include information from identifiable patients, according to HHS, which experts say keeps the arrangement from running afoul of privacy laws. But information on state capacity to meet COVID-19 hospitalization needs, particularly for the predictive purposes the FEMA administrator references and Palantir specializes in, is a potential goldmine for the secretive company.

“If they’re accessing these rich data sets directly from our public health infrastructure, will they exploit that to add economic value to their core data sets? If their AI learns how to infer and predict the patterns of the disease from our public data, then that becomes a hugely lucrative advantage for a private company, especially now when everyone, in every business sector, wants to know where COVID is going and how hard it’s going to hit,” said Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School.

Palantir has suggested that it doesn’t actually touch the data itself and merely helps the government sort through the data that the government, not Palantir, collects. “We are not mining the data, we are giving them the platform, analytical tools, and supporting data pipelines to enable them to do their own modeling,” its privacy officer, Courtney Bowman, told FedScoop on April 2.

But an email sent by FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor on April 5 to his regional administrators showed Palantir directly receives ventilator information—information necessary for mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak that has killed over 92,000 Americans since February.

...

..Asked if FEMA had requested other data be provided to Palantir, the FEMA spokesperson cited an April 10 letter from HHS Secretary Alex Azar seeking “daily reports on testing, capacity, supplies, utilization, and patient flows” from hospital administrators. The data was “to be submitted to HHS Protect directly or through other specified channels,” the spokesperson continued: “HHS Protect was set up specifically for this response effort by Palantir, a contractor working on consolidating the data.”

The emails were acquired by the watchdog group Accountable.US through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Daily Beast. Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said the emails raised troubling questions about the private company’s direct access to data with implications for both the public health response and for reopening the economy.