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<p>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 <ins class="ministerial">non-United Kingdom</ins><del
class="ministerial">American</del> websites.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
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