A very bad day for privacy: British NHS teams up with Amazon Alexa

8 days ago I wrote a small, slightly exaggerated fictional scenario in which your healthcare provider had access to the data collected by your smartphone.

This was a little example of a world I fear we're moving into, one in which we release identifiable personal information from ourselves as naturally as we breathe, as companies begin to collaborate, fuse, and advance in such a way that ensures consumers are manipulated and herded towards whichever outcome derives maximum profit, disregarding all notions of ethics and privacy along the way.

And we won't care or see it coming because we're distracted by vacuous marketing phrases like "hassle-free" and "take control of your [X] and simplify your [Y]" and "we care about your sensitive information".

Of course, this nightmare comes about in small steps. One such step occurred today.

The public British National Health Service has teamed up with Amazon, meaning Alexa users can very quickly diagnose their health conditions by directing voice commands that query the NHS official website. Now, upon reading that, I instinctively think it's a horrendous idea, but the truth is most people won't agree.

They'll simply repeat back the last piece of truth-by-assertion spin I sampled above, saying "Yes, but I can't see how this can be used to invade people's privacy, it's just taking control of our health by simplifying our means of diagnosis. It's hassle-free, you see. And Amazon doesn't even store patient information."

But as privacy/hacking expert Mustafa Al-Bassam wrote recently when discussing Facebook's new cryptocurrency Libra, "the road to dystopia is paved with good intentions"

And likewise, I've no doubt the NHS has all the best intentions for this collaboration - they are a noble, honest service full of genuine compassion.

Amazon, however, is not. Even last week they were under fire for indefinitely storing Alexa voice records, and granting employees access to them. Their entire modus operandi is to extract and abuse the endless data exhausts of millions of people. Alexa is a 24/7 wiretap that people voluntarily plant in their living rooms. Like fungus, it grows where it can.

How long before extremely private health-related metrics worm their way into Amazon's "customer/product improvement" algorithms? How long until Amazon's new patented home surveillance drone service combines with their hypothetical "customer health" arm and our pharmaceutical deliveries and repeat medical prescriptions are overseen entirely by Amazon?

Year 2029: Prime members skip queues at Accident & Emergency. Only if your social score exceeds 75, of course.

Farcical ramblings, you might say. Until it happens. Then the general response, much like what occurred after Snowden's heroic leaking of the NSA's illegal spying operations, is "well we already knew they were doing that, why is it surprising?".

And we move on, continuing down the nightmare path, and repeating the cycle: disregarding years of warning signs as blather, then switching to exhausted apathy when the worst actually occurs.

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