[johneth]

People will use Alexa to ask these questions with or without the NHS's publicly-available information. Except if they didn't use the NHS's publicly-available information, Alexa would use some other service like WebMD. The NHS' involvement (or lack of) would change nothing.

By your logic, Google is bypassing medical privacy laws because people can search 'what are chickenpox symptoms?' on Google Search.

Making information about medicines, diseases, conditions and symptoms freely available from a trusted source is a GOOD thing for society.

[yabadabadoes]

> Making information about medicines, diseases, conditions and symptoms freely available from a trusted source is a GOOD thing for society.

And this changes how? (You just sent me a link to the real trusted source.)

Making more people happy to go through WebMD like commercial portals that can learn more about the user and sell the data is bad. Adding legitimacy to these is bad.

[johneth]

My point (that you seem to have failed to grasp) is that people are going to use Alexa and Google and Siri and so on to ask about general medical information.

Those services will be providing this information anyway. In this scenario (which is reality as we know it), that information may as well come from the NHS with its mission to provide trusted information rather than, say, WebMD, with a mission to display ads.

[yabadabadoes]

Yes, I must just not understand Amazon, Google and Apples' commitments to providing free and accurate services irregardless of market conditions. If I did I'm sure I would want them to have unconditional license to repurpose everything.