Under a deal with the government, Amazon will be able to freely access health datacollected by the NHS.
The material to which the multinational technology, from which patient data will be excluded, will give it the ability to advertise and sell its own products.
As Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in July, a partnership between the NHS and Amazon Alexa, which would allow the app to give health advice to users, would reduce the workload of doctors and pharmacists.
According however to a publication in the Sunday Times, this contract will also allow the company to have access to information regarding the symptoms, the causes and the definitions of the symptoms and “all related intellectual property rights and data, as well as other material”.
The $863 billion company, run by one of the world's richest people, Jeff Bezos, will then be able to create "new products, applications, cloud services and/or distributed software." It can also share this information with third parties.
The opposition minister, Jonathan Ashworth, said in the Sunday Times that the government acted “grossly irresponsible” and with “the pocket of big corporate interests” in mind.
Eva Blum-Dumontet, senior researcher at Privacy International, said that the subject of the contract does not concern “data exchange” but “transparency”. Many sections have been drafted by the Ministry of Health and Social Care to protect Amazon's commercial interests.
A representative of the NHS said: “Patient data is not provided to this company by the NHS, which takes the patients' privacy very seriously and has put in place appropriate safeguards to ensure that the information is used correctly”.
For its part, Amazon says the content it is accessing is already available on the NHS website. “Amazon does not create health profiles for customers based on interactions with nhs.uk or use such requests for marketing purposes,” it added.
Third parties, such as local authorities, can reuse information from the NHS website, but the underlying agreements only allow for its use in the UK. The contract with Amazon, by contrast, states that the license applies worldwide.
A spokesperson for the company said: “General health-related content from the NHS website is now available to Alexa users via voice commands. The new option is particularly useful for those with accessibility needs who may not have been able to easily access nhs.uk content via mobile or computer in the past.”
