In the framework of an agreement with the Government, h Amazon will be able to have free access to health data, collected by the NHS.
Material accessed by the multinational company technology, which excludes patient data, will enable her to advertise and sell her own products.
As Health Minister Matt Hancock said in July, a partnership between the NHS and Amazon Alexa, that would allow application giving users health advice would reduce the workload of doctors and pharmacists.
However, according to a Sunday Times publication, the contract will also allow the company to access information about symptoms, causes and definitions of symptoms and "all relevant copyright and data, as well as other material". .
The renowned $ 863 billion company run by one of the richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, will then be able to create "new products, applications, cloud services and / or distributed software". It may also share this information with third parties.
Opposition Secretary Jonathan Ashworth told the Sunday Times that the government was "extremely irresponsible" and had in mind "the pocket of big corporate interests".
Eva Blum-Dumontet, senior researcher at Privacy International, said the subject of the contract was not about "data exchange" but about "transparency". Many sections have been compiled by the Department of Health and Social Care to protect Amazon's commercial interests.
An NHS spokesman said: "No NHS patient data is provided to this company, which takes patients' privacy very seriously and has put in place appropriate safeguards to ensure that information is used correctly."
For its part, Amazon states that the content it has access to is already available on the NHS website. “Amazon does not create customer health profiles based on interactions with content nhs.uk or uses such requests for marketing purposes, ”he added.
Third parties, such as local authorities, may re-use information from the NHS website, but key agreements only allow them to be used on the NHS website. United Kingdom. The contract with Amazon, on the other hand, states that the license is valid worldwide.
One company spokesman said: “General health-related content from the NHS website is now available to Alexa users via voice commands. The new option is especially useful for those who have accessibility needs and who may not have had easy access to nhs.uk content via mobile device or computer in the past."
Source: secnews.gr
