Month: April 2021

Google Earth has launched a time-lapse feature that lets users wind back the clock and see how the world has changed over several decades.

The feature uses millions of satellite images from the past 37 years to let people scroll through time.

It allows people to see, for example, the retreat of glaciers alongside global warming, or the deforestation of the Amazon over time.

The company says it is the biggest update to Google Earth in four years.

Google Earth uses similar technology to the widely used Maps product, but is more focused on geology and exploration than public transport and directions.

Users can access the tool in a web browser, and the feature comes with some pre-packaged virtual tours of an Alaskan glacier melting over the years or forest protection efforts in Brazil.

But the time-lapse feature is global – meaning users can just type in any location and experiment with whatever images are available.

Google is heavily marketing the tool as a way to raise awareness of climate change and other environmental issues.

It pointed to the shifting sands of Cape Cod and the drying of Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea as striking examples of how the landscape is changing.

But it also documents the boom in towns and cities across the world – from the rapid expansion of Las Vegas to the building of artificial islands in Dubai.

“We have a clearer picture of our changing planet right at our fingertips – one that shows not just problems but also solutions, as well as mesmerisingly beautiful natural phenomena that unfold over decades,” Google said.

An Earth-sized video
Under the hood, the new version of Google Earth is powered by 24 million different satellite photos, from Nasa, the US Geological Survey’s Landsat project, and the EU’s Copernicus project.

Google said the new features “simply wouldn’t have been possible” without the “commitments to open and accessible data” from those space agencies.

While the average user will only see a tiny fraction of the system at a time, Google says the animated time-lapse imagery is essentially one giant video mosaic, made up of individual video tiles.

The 24 million images date back as far as 1984, and take up 20 petabytes – 20 million gigabytes – of storage space, and “quadrillions of pixels”, the company said.

Together, they make one single video 4.4 terapixels in size – something Google said is the equivalent of more than half a million 4K ultra-high-resolution videos.

Processing all that data took more than two million hours of computer time – shared among thousands of high-powered machines owned by Google to get the job done in a reasonable timeframe.

Google reveals travel habits during the pandemic
Google Maps to start showing eco-friendly routes
Microsoft puts the entire world in Flight Simulator
“As far as we know, time-lapse in Google Earth is the largest video on the planet, of our planet,” the company said.

That kind of heavy processing in air-conditioned data centres uses vast amounts of power, and has a significant environmental impact. Google argues that all its data centres are carbon neutral, though it does this through the practice of offsetting – paying for environmental projects to “balance” its use of energy.

The huge amount of historical data also has other practical benefits – such as removing clouds. Any one set of photos from the Earth’s surface will have areas obscured by cloud cover that the satellite can’t see.But over time, different pockets become visible, which can then all be stitched together to form a picture of what’s underneath.

Google says it plans to update this new time-lapse project every year for at least the next decade.

“We hope that this perspective of the planet will ground debates, encourage discovery and shift perspectives about some of our most pressing global issues,” it said.

Imagine wearing high-tech body armour that makes you super strong and tireless.

Such technology, more specifically called an exoskeleton, sounds like the preserve of the Iron Man series of superhero movies.

Yet the equipment is increasingly being worn in real life around the world. And one manufacturer – California’s SuitX – expects it to go mainstream.

“There is no doubt in my mind that these devices will eventually be sold at hardware stores,” says SuitX’s founder Homayoon Kazerooni. “As the prices come down you’ll be able to simply buy them at Home Depot.”

In simple terms, an exoskeleton is an external device that supports, covers and protects its user, giving greater levels of strength and endurance.

Sometimes also referred to as “wearable robots”, they can be battery-powered and computer-operated, incorporating motors and hydraulics. Or they can be more simple, passive designs that use springs and dampeners.

“Integrating humans and machines into one system opens up a new realm of opportunity,” says Adrian Spragg, an expert on the technology at management consultancy Accenture. “Many of the early applications have been focused on military and medical applications, but in the last several years there’s been an explosion of use in a range of cases.”

This expansion, which has come together with rapid advances in the technology, has seen exoskeletons increasingly used by manufacturing workers. Versions for consumers are also now being developed to help people more easily do everything from DIY, to walking, climbing stairs, and other daily activities.

One report says sales are now due to rocket as a result. Global exoskeleton revenues are expected to rise from $392m (£284m) in 2020 to $6.8bn in 2030, according to a study by ABI Research.

SuitX’s “suits” are now being tested by car manufacturers General Motors and Fiat. Prof Kazerooni, who is also the director of the University of California’s Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, says that the primary benefit of the firm’s exoskeletons is to prevent muscle fatigue.

“We’ve shown that muscle activity in the back, shoulder and knees drops by 50%,” he says. “If muscle activities drop, that means the risk of muscle injury is less.

“This means that factory or plant managers get more productivity, their insurance costs are lower, and there are less workdays lost to injury. There’s less cost and more productivity.”

General Motors is also looking at a battery-powered exoskeleton glove developed by Swedish firm Bioservo.

This glove, called the Iron Hand, has sensors and motors in each finger, which automatically respond to the level of force that the wearer applies to his or her hand when lifting or gripping something. The glove therefore takes up some of the strain.

BioServo says it can increase the wearer’s hand strength by 20% for extended periods.

Jason Cottrell, the chief executive of MyPlanet, a Canadian software firm that has conducted surveys on the use of exoskeletons, says the world is only just beginning to understand the potential for exoskeleton technology.

A “simple flaw” caused by a language difference led to a “serious incident” for a flight from Birmingham last year.

All female passengers whose title was “Miss” were classified as children – not adults – on the Tui flight after a software upgrade, a report said.

That meant that their average weight used for take-off calculations was lower than it should have been.

The difference could have had an impact on take-off thrust, but the report said flight operation was not compromised.

Take-off prep documents told the pilot that his Boeing 737 jet was 1,244kg lighter than it actually was after using 35kg as the average weight of the females involved rather than 69kg.

That “load sheet” is used to determine how much weight is safe, how the plane is balanced, and other important information for a safe flight within safety regulations.

The AAIB report on the incident said the reservation system that produces the load sheet had been upgraded in the downtime caused by the coronavirus lockdown last year, when the airline suspended flights “for several months”.

Safety officials said the problem was that the software had been programmed in a foreign country where “Miss” is used to refer to children, and “Ms” to adult women.

‘Too many at front of plane’ caused take-off issue
How safe is it to get on a plane?
That simple language difference led to 38 adult women being considered “children” by the computer system – a difference which, when added to the rest of the passengers and cargo, led to the plane’s calculated and actual weights differing by more than a tonne.

The flight was an early-morning departure from Birmingham International to Majorca, on 21 July 2020.

The Air Accidents Aviation Branch (AAIB) said that in this case, the difference in the calculation of take-off thrust was out by only 0.1% – so “the safe operation of the aircraft was not compromised”.

Investigators said two other flights the same day also suffered from the same problem, but extra manual checks were immediately brought in to prevent the problem happening again.

And another upgrade of the computer system solved the problem.

In a statement, Tui said: “The health and safety of our customers and crew is always our primary concern. Following this isolated incident, we corrected a fault identified in our IT system.

“As stated in the report, the safe operation of the flight was not compromised.”

Everyone has their breaking point. And when it comes it can be a small thing, an incident that usually wouldn’t matter.

Shannon Wait’s moment was when her Google-issued water bottle broke. The data centre she worked in was hot, so she asked for another one. However, she says the Google subcontractor refused to give her one.

That moment sparked a chain reaction that led to an announcement last week. Google signed a statement saying the company’s workers had the right to discuss pay and conditions with each other.

It might seem bizarre that even needed to be said.

But in actual fact it was the culmination of Shannon’s battle with the company.

Her story is one of management overreach, a story that shines a light on managerial practices that have become synonymous with Big Tech.

Shannon finished her history degree in 2018 and started working at a Google data centre in South Carolina the following February, earning $15 (£10.90) an hour.

“You’re fixing the servers, which includes swapping out hard drives, swapping motherboards, lifting heavy batteries, they’re like 30lb (13.6kg) each,” she says. “It’s really difficult work.”

Google’s offices are famed for being creative, alternative and fun – with table tennis tables, free snacks and music rooms. However, what Shannon describes sounds less idyllic.

“People aren’t playing games all day like you see in the movies… the data centre is completely different,” she says.

Shannon was a contractor at Google. That means that although she worked in a Google data centre, she was actually employed by a subcontractor called Modis, part of a group of companies owned by another firm, Adecco.

That complex arrangement has become increasingly common at Google. About half of the people who work for the company are reportedly employed as contractors.

It also makes working out who actually carries the can for managerial mistakes complex. But we’ll get to that later.

Shannon says when the pandemic hit, the work got harder. The minimum number of jobs per shift increased. But there was a sweetener.

“Around the time of May 2020, Google announced that they were going to handle the pandemic in an honourable way. They said that they were going to give bonuses to every employee, including contractors, who work in person,” she says.

“The time came that we were supposed to get that bonus and it never appeared in any of our bank accounts. We started getting concerned like, you know, I really could use this extra money.”

It was around this point that she says employees started talking to each other about the bonus, and how much they were entitled to receive.

“We started asking each other about pay, but any time it came up in front of management we were told not to talk about it.”

Shannon says she was even sent a message by a manager saying: “It is never ok to discuss compensation with your peers”. She shared it with the BBC.

Shannon did eventually receive her bonus, but says she had become disillusioned. She had hoped to get a full-time job at Google. However, she noticed a culture of “perma-temps”, temporary staff who she says would never get made staff, no matter how much they tried.

Frustrated by management, Shannon reached what she says was her breaking point.

“It’s very hot in the data centres – about 85F (29.5C). So Google issued me a water bottle, but the cap on it broke.”

She says the same thing happened to her colleague, a full-time Google employee. However, Shannon says although her colleague was given a new bottle, she wasn’t. She went home and typed up a Facebook post.

Eventually, she says she had “had enough”.

“The next day, I was at work, I got called into a conference room with all, for the most, the managers present. And they told me that my Facebook post was in violation of the non-disclosure agreement, and that I was a security risk and needed to hand over my badge and my laptop immediately, and be escorted off site.”

The Alphabet Workers Union was set up in January 2021 for Google workers. It is not recognised by the National Labor Relations Board, an independent government agency, and is sometimes referred to as a “minority union”. The vast majority of Google workers aren’t members, but Shannon was and the union took up her case.

In February, they filed two cases on her behalf under unfair labour practice laws. One that she had been suspended illegally – for talking about supporting a union. The other that her managers had asked her, illegally, not to discuss her wages.

Last month Google, Modis and the Alphabet Workers Union reached a settlement.

Shannon’s suspension was overturned.Google signed a document saying its employees “have the right to discuss wage rates, bonuses, and working conditions”.

It was a victory for both Shannon and the newly-formed union.

“People who work in warehouses and data centres for these trillion dollar companies are tired of even their smallest rights being trampled on. And they’re realising that the companies aren’t listening to their workers. So we’re going to make them.”

Last week, Amazon workers in Alabama voted on whether they should unionise. Amazon is desperate to avoid workers unionising.

The result is expected soon. It’s the latest battle between Big Tech and some workers who feel, to put it mildly, unloved.

“I think that one of the biggest things that people can learn is that not all Google employees make six figures… and even on the lowest level at Google, they have so much power – so much more power than they realise,” said Shannon.

And as for Google?

Well it didn’t admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, and didn’t admit to being a “joint employer” of contract staff. The BBC put Shannon’s story to Google but it said it had nothing further to add. Adecco has not responded to a BBC request for comment.

Shannon doesn’t want to return to a Google data centre, and ultimately wants to do a PhD in history. But she has already contributed to the history books, a rare win by an employee against a tech giant.

You may never have heard of her – but the founder of dating app Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, has joined Forbes list of the super-rich.

And while others, such as fellow billionaire Kim Kardashian, are grabbing the headlines, there is an argument that the lesser known Wolfe Herd could serve as an equally strong role model.

The 31-year-old became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire when she took Bumble public in February.

She rang the Nasdaq bell with her 18-month-old baby son on her hip. In her speech she said she wanted to make the internet “a kinder, more accountable place”.

In an interview with the BBC in 2017, Ms Wolfe Herd said the secret to being an effective chief executive was not to take yourself “too seriously”. She also emphasised the need to find a work/life balance and make time for family, even if that meant “taking an afternoon off”.

Her rise to membership of the billionaires’ club has been an interesting one.

Before Bumble, she was among the founding team at Tinder but after tensions with other executives – one of whom she had been dating – she left. Shortly after, she launched a sexual harassment case.

Tinder’s parent company, Match Group Inc, denied the claims but paid around $1m to settle the dispute.

As a result of the case, she experienced a lot of online abuse, prompting her to delete her Twitter account.

Bumble, rather pointedly, is all about putting women in control.

The central focus of her app is that only women can initiate a conversation in heterosexual matches. It is a simple idea but one that makes a world of difference to those on the dating scene who have been bombarded with unwanted messages from men.

She founded Bumble with help from early investor Russian billionaire Andrey Adreev, who also has a stake in Badoo, both of which he sold in November 2019.

Ms Wolfe Herd owns a 11.6% stake in Bumble, giving her an estimated net worth of $1.3bn. She also heads Badoo. The two apps have a combined 40 million users, 2.4 million of whom pay a subscription.

Ms Wolf Herd grew up in Utah and in an interview after Bumble went public, she spoke to Time Magazine about an abusive relationship she was in as a teenager, and how it “stripped her down to nothing” while also “informing her understanding of what was wrong with gender dynamics”.

In the same interview, she appeared determined to put her past behind her: “I don’t need to justify myself any more,” she said.

“Why am I cleaning up somebody else’s drama? Women are always cleaning up somebody else’s mess.”

Her willingness to talk openly and to avoid corporate speak has won her fans.

Yet while she may be keen to carve a different path to that of other tech companies, last year Bumble logged more than 880,000 incidents that violated its guidelines – and like many other platforms it too relies on Artificial Intelligence to scan for hate speech.

Its latest campaign is against body shaming, banning derogatory remarks about appearance, body shape and size.

Ms Wolfe Herd is one of 328 women who made Forbes’ 2021 list of the world’s billionaires, up from 241 women last year.

This year, MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, is among the top three richest women – beaten to the top spot by Alice Walton, who made her money via Walmart and frontrunner Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, whose grandfather founded cosmetics giant L’Oreal.

On Wednesday last week, Google’s Fiona Cicconi wrote to company employees.

She announced that Google was bringing forward its timetable of moving people back into the office.

As of 1 September, she said, employees wishing to work from home for more than 14 days would have to apply to do so.

Employees were also expected to “live within commuting distance” of offices. No cocktails by the beach with a laptop, then.

The intention was very clear. Sure, you can do more flexible working than you did before – but most people will still have to come into the office.

That thinking seemed to fly in the face of much of what we heard from Silicon Valley executives last year, when they championed the virtues of remote working.

For example, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey made headlines across the world last May, when he said “Twitter employees can now work from home forever”.

It was speculated that after Covid, the “new normal” for Silicon Valley might be a workforce heavily geared around remote working, with tech companies needing only minimal staff on-site.

It’s increasingly looking like that’s not going to happen.

How cities might change if we worked from home more
‘People have forgotten how to be sociable’
Google rejigs remote working as it reopens offices
And if you really look at the statements made by tech bosses, some of the nuances were skirted over by the press.

For example, when Mr Dorsey said employees could work at home “forever”, he added, ” if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home.”

That was a pretty important “if”.

And in fact, Twitter has clarified that it expects a majority of its staff to spend some time working from home and some time in the office.

Pretty much every Silicon Valley tech firm has said that it is now committed to “flexible” or “hybrid” working.

The problem is those terms can mean almost anything.

Is that Fridays off? Or a completely different working relationship with a brick-and-mortar office?

Microsoft envisages “‘working from home part of the time (less than 50%) as standard for most roles” in the future.

There is a lot of room for manoeuvre in the words “less than 50%”.

Amazon also issued a statement to employees last week saying: “Our plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline. We believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the new work-from-home age, then.

Part of the hesitancy is that although many employees want more flexibility, it’s still not at all clear what kind of model works for the companies.

“None of us have this all figured out,” said Carolyn Everson, vice-president of Facebook’s global business group, when talking about current work-from-home arrangements.

“We are making this up on the fly.”

Remotely attractive
Harvard Business School professor and remote working advocate Prithwiraj Choudhury says that tech companies have long been at the vanguard of remote working.

“The early adopters and the companies that are embracing this model and building the organisation around that remote work model will have a huge advantage in attracting talent,” he says.

That is certainly the hope.

No tech business wants to lose able employees to rivals who will allow them to work more flexibly.

Companies like Spotify now appear to have some of the most “flexible” working practices for its staff.

In a recent statement it said: “Our employees will be able to work full time from home, from the office, or a combination of the two.

“The exact mix of home and office work mode is a decision each employee and their manager make together.”

But it did add: “There are likely to be some adjustments to make along the way.”

So Spotify’s definition of flexible working is very different to Google’s, which in turn is very different to Amazon’s.

Working from home while there is no office open is one thing. But remote working’s biggest test is going to be when the office starts opening up – let’s say at 50% capacity.

When meetings are being held partially in person and partially on Zoom, is the dynamic going to work quite so well?

And when some team members develop face-to-face, in-person relationships with managers, will remote workers feel disadvantaged?

Last week, IBM announced its proposed system of remote working, with 80% of the workforce working at least three days a week in the office.

“When people are remote, I worry about what their career trajectory is going to be,” said IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna.

“If they want to become a people manager, if they want to get increasing responsibilities, or if they want to build a culture within their teams, how are we going to do that remotely?” he asked.

Tantalisingly, we are about to find out what works and what doesn’t, because there are so many differing approaches being taken by tech companies.

And like so much of modern day life, other businesses are looking over at the west coast of America to see what’s working here – and what isn’t.

One in eight porn videos promoted to first-time users of the UK’s leading adult sites are labelled with text describing sexually violent acts, according to a study.

It analysed titles and descriptions of 131,738 videos on Pornhub, XVideos and XHamster’s launch pages.

One researcher said the prevalence of descriptions of rape, physical abuse and incest was “shocking”.

The sites have challenged the study and said they remove illegal content.

The findings are published in the latest issue of The British Journal of Criminology.

The researchers involved took hourly screenshots of the homepages on the three most popular porn websites, over a six-month period between 2017 and 2018.

Descriptions and titles – but not the content of the videos themselves – were searched-for keywords that corresponded with the World Health Organisation’s definition of sexual violence.

The researchers then excluded what they considered to be consensual BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism) videos from their findings.

New visitors
The research reported:

more than 8,000 titles referred to physical aggression or forced sexual activity
2,966 titles described image-based sexual abuse, including “hidden cams” and “upskirting”
5,785 titles described sexual activity between family members – the most common category of “sexually violent” material identified in the report
Pornhub, XHamster and XVideos were chosen as they are the three most visited porn websites in the UK.

The content would be visible to first-time visitors on the website, and was available to view for free with little or no age verification process, the study said.

UK’s controversial ‘porn blocker’ plan dropped
UK to introduce porn age-checks in July
Common keywords included “forced”, “grope” and “molest,” the analysis found.

The word “teen” was the most frequently appearing word in the entire data, accounting for 7.7% of all videos.

This rose to 8.5% in videos which were identified as having described sexual violence.

Terms and conditions
In their terms and conditions, Pornhub and XVideos prohibit all content “depicting” child sexual abuse, rape, incest and forced sexual acts.

And XHamster bans material that is “unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing” or “hateful”.

Pornhub’s owner Mindgeek recently removed millions of videos that had been uploaded by users who had not been verified after claims of hosting illegal content.

But it defended the clips it has allowed to remain online.

“Consenting adults are entitled to their own sexual preferences, as long as they are legal and consensual, and all kinks that meet these criteria are welcome on Pornhub,” said a spokesman.

The other sites did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Last week, Pornhub released its first-ever transparency report, which said it had removed 653,465 videos for violating its rules.

“Remember, a kink that looks degrading or humiliating is not the same thing as an illegal, abusive, or non-consensual act,” the report added.

“What goes on between consenting adults is exactly that: consensual. Non-consent must be distinguished from consent to relinquish control.”

But Clare McGlynn QC, a professor of law at Durham who co-authored the study, said: “It’s shocking that this is the material that the porn companies themselves are choosing to showcase to first-time users.”

‘Look convincing’
Fiona Vera-Gray, a legal research fellow and co-author of the study, said sexually violent material “eroticised non-consent” and distorted “the boundary between sexual pleasure and sexual violence”.

The wording used in titles and descriptions are optimised for searches “to entice an audience,” said Charlotte Rose, a former sex worker of more than 20 years.

She said the majority of porn produced in the UK was “ethical and consensual” but that videos on leading platforms were not always transparent.

“For your average viewer it can be hard to tell what is real and what is fantasy,” she explained.

“Porn performers can make things look convincing, they can depict harm but actually, the actors are enjoying it because that’s their kink.”

Ms Rose said some extreme and unregulated porn “can create a bridge that leads to other violent acts” and argued that viewers should be “made aware” of porn videos that are “ethical, consensual and fantasy, not real life”.

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by sexual abuse or violence, this page might be able to help.

Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant designed to compete with Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant, is to be retired on mobile.

Instead it will focus on offering productivity help in Windows 10, Outlook and Teams.

The hashtag #RIPCortana was being used on Twitter, as people reminisced – or in some cases pointed out how forgettable the assistant had been.

Meanwhile, Apple’s Siri will no longer default to a female voice in English.

The use of a female voice for virtual assistants has long been controversial for gender-typing a helpful, virtual companion.

Cortana was unveiled in 2014 as a virtual assistant for Windows phones. It was named after the advanced artificial intelligence guide in Microsoft’s then best-selling Halo game series.

Three years later, Microsoft abandoned its smartphone operating system, although Cortana remained available for iPhones and Android devices.

The death of the voice assistant on most platforms was announced last summer and in January, Microsoft ended support for Cortana integration in the Harman Kardon Invoke speaker. It offered speaker owners who used Cortana, a $50 Microsoft gift card.

Ben Wood, chief analyst at research firm CSS Insight said: “There was a certain inevitability to Microsoft abandoning the consumer-centric variant of Cortana. Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are the mass market voice assistants of choice, leaving little space for rivals.

“Even the mighty Apple has struggled to get traction with Siri despite making huge investments to drive the platform forward.

“Microsoft has made a sensible decision to double down on Cortana as a platform to aid productivity gains, closely tied to its business-centric tools and services. Increasingly Cortana will become deeply integrated into specific Microsoft platforms, rather than being a generic voice assistant designed to be all things to all people.”

Female voice
Rival Apple has added two new voices to its assistant Siri, as well as eliminating the default female voice in the latest version of iOS.

In 2019 a report by UNESCO suggested that using female voices by default for voice assistants “sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command”.

Apple said of its decision to put the onus on users to choose the voice of its assistant: “This is a continuation of Apple’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in.”

In some countries and languages, Siri already defaults to a male voice.

The NHS has promised transparency in any future deals with US data firm Palantir after the coronavirus pandemic.

It follows a lawsuit by Open Democracy which accused the NHS of “sneaking through” a £23m contract with the firm.

The group said it had won the lawsuit, because “the government finally caved”.

But the NHS maintains it always acted legally, and that campaigners dropped the case “when they realised they didn’t have a leg to stand on”.

The lawsuit was withdrawn by Open Democracy and the NHS clarified it would follow the proper process in future.

Palantir: The controversial firm now worth £17bn
NHS faces legal action over data contract
Palantir helps analyse huge volumes of data generated by governments and businesses, and sorts through the information for useful insights, patterns and connections.

It has frequently been the subject of scrutiny by privacy campaigners.

Founded with support from the US Central Intelligence Agency in 2003, it has been linked to efforts to track undocumented migrant workers in America in recent years.

The deal
Palantir’s involvement in the NHS began in March 2020, on a short-term basis, to suggest how best to deploy resources during the coronavirus pandemic.

It analysed a so-called “datastore” of health information where personal details were “pseudonymised, anonymised or aggregated” to protect privacy.

In December, Palantir’s short-term contract was extended for two years.

The contract – seen by the BBC – sets out how the data analysis will be used for insights into dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

‘Mission creep’
One clause also says “the services to be provided by Palantir extend to matters far beyond the response to the Covid-19 pandemic” -including Brexit, NHS workforce plans, and general government business.

Open Democracy, which labels Palantir a “spy-tech” company, argued this clause was “mission creep” and needed public consultation.

The NHS said it would have always followed due process for any non-Covid applications of the data, regardless of a legal challenge.

It did not rule out Palantir using data this way in future.

Impact assessment
The technical complaint was whether a new Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) needed to be done for the revised deal.

A DPIA can involve public consultation, depending on what data is used and how.

One was completed for Palantir’s current contract in April last year, and the NHS confirmed it would conduct another if the contract was extended.

“Facing our lawsuit, the government has finally caved,” an Open Democracy blog said.

“They’ve pressed pause, committing not to extend Palantir’s contract beyond Covid without consulting the public.”

‘Spurious claim’
But the NHS told the BBC the contract had not been paused, and said proper checks would have always been conducted before extending the parameters of Palantir’s role.

A spokesman said: “Open Democracy have had to drop their court case unilaterally as it was apparent even to them that the NHS has always acted in accordance with its legal responsibilities.

“They, therefore, stood no chance of succeeding in their completely spurious claim… far from ‘winning’ this case, they had no choice but to drop it when they realised they hadn’t a leg to stand on.”

Data and how to manage and process it has been key to the battle against Covid-19 – just think of the charts shown by Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance at the Downing Street press conferences, and the government’s insistence that the timetable for easing lockdown is all about data, not dates.

So last spring, when the data about the disease was thin and managing it looked a bit of a nightmare, the government turned to a company that had experience at just this kind of work.

Palantir had already been a supplier to the public sector, notably working for Sunderland council to bring together various streams of data from social services and the police in an efficiency drive. It was also a controversial company, both for its work with ICE, the US border force working to deport undocumented immigrants, and because its founder Peter Thiel was one of the very few Silicon Valley figures to support President Donald Trump.

The government has always insisted that while Palantir’s tools were used to interrogate and understand the mass of data about the virus, the company was not being given any permanent access to sensitive health records, or the ability to use them for other purposes.

The decision to renew the contract with a £23m deal came as no surprise to another supplier of data services to the UK government.

“Once you’re in, you’re in”, he said, making the point that companies often underbid on a first contract just to get a foot in the door.

“You know you’re going to get the extensions, the improvements, which will make the whole thing profitable. The system is designed not to change. Colour me not surprised that Palantir got an extension.”