Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what safeguards to protect (1) patient confidentiality, (2) intellectual property, (3) data, and (4) other materials, from inappropriate use have been built into the agreement to share NHS health data with Amazon.

No patient data is being shared with Amazon as part of this agreement. The collaboration with Amazon simply connects people to information that is already freely available through the National Health Service website. Use of Amazon Alexa is an alternative mechanism for accessing that information. Patients already use Alexa and other devices to search for information on a range of health issues. This agreement ensures that the information they receive from Alexa is medically verified by the NHS instead of from a range of other sources, such as non-United Kingdom websites.

This agreement is not exclusive. There are over 2,000 other organisations that are accessing and using information from the NHS website in a similar way.

The agreement signed between the Department and Amazon is clear that none of the data generated through voice search using Alexa will be shared with third parties; that it will not be used for selling products or making product recommendations to Amazon users; nor is it building any form of health profiles on Amazon customers.

All information is treated with high confidentiality and Amazon use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption, and audits of our control environment to protect it. The information that Amazon collects is only used to train its speech recognition software and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand the requests of users and ensure the service works well for everyone. No Amazon employee has direct access to information that can identify the person or account, and Amazon have the appropriate measures in place to ensure General Data Protection Regulation compliance.