Data-driven governance threatens privacy, says barrister
Data-driven governance threatens privacy, says barrister
https://the-european.eu/story-61464/how-britain-is-sleepwalking-into-an-orwellian-data-state.html
Publish Date: 2026-06-02 10:38:00
Source Domain: the-european.eu
From policing and healthcare to migration and defence, advanced analytics is increasingly becoming embedded across the British state. Dr Raj Joshi argues that existing legal safeguards were not designed for this new era of data-driven governance, and that the consequences for privacy and democratic accountability could be profound
Earlier this month, the Mayor of London took the extraordinary step of blocking a £50m contract between the Metropolitan Police Service and Palantir Technologies. His reasons were stark: serious procurement failures, lack of competition, inadequate value-for-money justification and failure to consider ethical and human-rights implications. City Hall also questioned whether Palantir’s global activities, including its publicly acknowledged work with the Israeli Ministry of Defence, aligned with “the values of our city”.
The Met called the decision “disappointing”. Yet the Mayor’s intervention highlighted a wider concern: How did Britain reach a point where a US defence-analytics company, openly supporting a foreign military campaign, came close to becoming the data spine of its largest police force?
To answer that, we must look beyond the headlines, and back to George Orwell’s 1984.
Orwell imagined a future in which the state’s power rested on its ability to watch, record and interpret every aspect of human life. What he could not have foreseen is that some of the most sophisticated surveillance capabilities would be developed by private corporations and then integrated into the state’s most sensitive systems.
No company exemplifies this development more clearly than Palantir Technologies, whose software now underpins policing, healthcare, defence and migration systems across the UK. Palantir insists it merely integrates data. The concern lies in the concentration of power and visibility that such systems can create.
One issue that has received increasing attention is Palantir’s documented work with Israel.
Palantir’s…
