I have been compiling a giant spreadsheet of government contracts responding to Coronavirus since the end of May, and the data available on them from the contractsfinder site is opaque and partial. The lack of transparency smells of corruption. https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1289945852228689923

Not only has the government no released enough public data, but it's tried to centralise data in a way which may be politically useful to the government and its cronies later. The government doesn't seem to care about the pandemic as much as the political capital it can make.

The effective abolition of tendering for public sector contracts on March 18 has allowed the government to award contracts to companies which have not been properly scrutinised. We do not know how long these emergency procurement measures will last.

Here's a snapshot of the biggest contracts I've found. Some of them are framework contracts, and there are also some we just don't know the value of, because they've not been published for some reason (though they've been reported in the press).

The work @JolyonMaugham is doing with @GoodLawProject to scrutinise some of these contracts is valuable, but there are hundreds of them. It will take years to go back over these decisions and try to understand if anything illegal happened in the way they were awarded.

The other concern is that data on public sector contracts in the UK may get even worse in 2021 if the UK no longer has to publish public sector contracts on the http://ted.europa.eu  site as well as on http://contractsfinder.service.gov.uk 

The EU site has more info than the UK site.

Some companies are making absolutely huge amounts of money from this. Zuehlke Engineering, who got £6m of contracts for the failed contract tracing app, published this blogpost recently. It's a bit triumphalist. https://www.zuehlke.com/blog/en/digitalisation-in-medtech-five-tips-taken-from-practice/

Do they get to keep their £6m worth of contracts if the contact tracing app never materialises? I guess so.

You can hear them rubbing their hands in glee at all the medical data they've probably got their hands on already. That's the point. This is not to protect the public, it's to make money through leveraging data.

This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls 'behavioural surplus' in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This new form of capitalism creates value out of what was previously outside the market - your data, including everything your doctors know about you.

Good luck doing a GDPR request for all that stuff. It's already being fed into the machine learning algorithms of Babylon Health, Faculty AI and Palantir so they can create software that can predict what you need, what you will buy, what you will die from.

If knowledge is power, this is a power grab on a huge, corporate scale. The state is dwindling, and all its services will be replaced by privatised ones. Your AI GP brought to you by Babylon Health will see you now.