Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government why several sections of the contract to share NHS data with Amazon were redacted when placed in the public domain.

The agreement between the Department and Amazon is about using content from the National Health Service website to provide reliable and informative answers to basic health questions asked to Amazon’s virtual assistant voice service, Alexa. This content is already freely available on the NHS website. 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.

A limited number of clauses have been redacted due to being exempt under Section 43(2) of the Freedom Of Information Agreement, which exempts information where the release would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any entity, including the public authority holding the information.

In this case, we consider that the release of the redacted clauses would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of Amazon on the basis that it would make public the non-standard terms that Amazon has been willing to enter into in respect of this agreement. Disclosure of the redacted clauses has potential to prejudice existing agreements between Amazon and other parties, which could result in other parties challenging Amazon over the terms and conditions of their agreements.

In addition, certain personal information has been redacted in the agreement. This information is exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of Freedom Of Information Agreement as disclosure of this personal information would breach the data protection principles. In particular, we consider that the disclosure of this personal information would be unfair and breach the first data principle.