Privacy International, a UK based charity, following a series of FOI requests has suggested concerning information in the Department of Health and Social Care contract with Amazon, regarding the use of NHS content Alexa. The organisation has also called for transparency, with details of the contract redacted.
In July a deal was announced to enable Amazon Alexa to use the content available on NHS websites for customers of Amazon through its virtual assistant Alexa. Questions such as ‘how do I treat a migraine?’ to ‘what are the symptoms of chickenpox’ could be asked and Alexa would use content from NHS websites.
At the time the detail of the deal wasn’t available, which led to Privacy International seeking to understand it further.
On October 16th, the Department of Health published their contract with Amazon.
The Privacy International has produced an article examining the contract, however notes there has been a lot of information redacted and therefore the details of the deal are not clear.
However Privacy International said the contract suggests more than just content on the NHS Website is part of the contract:
“In addition to the content of the NHS website (“All of Licensor’s healthcare information, including without limitation symptoms, causes, and definitions, and all related copyrightable content, data, information and other materials Licensor makes available to Amazon”) and the right to use the NHS logo, they are also granting Amazon access to their Application Programming Interface (API).”
“Another interesting element in the contract is that Amazon is not making the NHS any promise, beyond guaranteeing it will give an attribution to the NHS when the NHS content is being quoted. They do not actually guarantee that when their users will ask health related questions they will always use the NHS content.”
“While this particular contract may sound harmless at first – after all it is good news if Amazon uses the NHS as a trusted source for information for medical queries – we should not be naïve about the intentions of big companies that are preying over the NHS. This particular partnership also raises questions when it comes to competition regulation of dominant players in the digital era. With their business model relying increasingly on the availability of consumers’ data, dominant online platforms can engage in various forms of data exploitation or even impose unfair terms for consumers.”
