Palantir, protests and shedding light on ‘spy tech’

Why it's a journalist's job to interview controversial, impactful figures. When Gillian Tett recently interviewed Palantir co-founder Alex Karp, protesters picketed the event as the company is likely to win a contract to manage more NHS data, despite receiving 50 per cent of its revenue from sector groups. In this piece, she explains why this means we need to hear more, not less, from the people running big data.