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UK saves 'millions' of pounds by ditching Palantir for refugee system (www.bbc.com)

submitted 12 hours ago by heliotrope@retrofed.com to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46881783

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[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 21 points 10 hours ago

Ah yes, the good old candyman tactic: the first one's free to rope you in.

Homes for Ukraine was set up in in March 2022, less than a month after Russia's full scale invasion.

Through a website, backed by an IT system, those who had a rent-free space in their home or a separate residence could to offer it to refugees.

In order to set this up quickly, then-Conservative government ministers accepted an offer from Palantir to build a system to administrate the scheme, based on its Foundry platform, for free for six months.

In a 2023 blog post, Palantir described the challenge of combining data from multiple government systems containing tens of thousands of visa applications and hundreds of thousands of accommodation offers.

Subsequent 12-month contracts were awarded - one worth £4.5m and another £5.5m, according to a National Audit Office report.

The report notes the Government's chief commercial officer informed Palantir of his concern about the firm's practice of offering a zero- or nominal-cost initial offer to gain a commercial foothold.

I'm not dismissing the work it takes to help refuges, but it still seems to me using Palantir for that is shooting cannons at sparrows. I wonder if they had other motivations beyond good publicity and what for Mr Thiel must be pocket money.