First, Amazon learned what I read.
Then Amazon learned what I put in my home. It tracked what I covet as gifts. It started watching what I watch on TV. Next, Amazon bought my grocery to learn what I eat.
Now Amazon wants to own my doctor’s office, too. One of history’s largest corporations may soon know more about me than I do — and that ought to make anyone uncomfortable.
My jaw dropped when I heard the news on Thursday that Amazon was purchasing One Medical, a digitally savvy primary care doctor’s office I’ve trusted with my medical care since 2009. My mind raced: Will Amazon now use my medical records to push pills and broccoli? Will it tell my doctor if I’m drinking too much beer? Will Amazon micromanage my doctor like its warehouse workers? Will it try to replace my health care with a Q&A from Alexa?
So I called up one of America’s preeminent medical ethicists, Arthur Caplan of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
“I think you should be feeling hyper nervous and a little bit depressed,” he told me. “Synergy makes great business sense, but it may make lousy consumer sense for health care.”
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all technology with the same critical eye.)
The writing has been on the wall for some time that mega-corporate consolidation is coming to health care. Insurance giant Aetna merged with CVS. Amazon made its interest known by buying online pharmacy PillPack and developing products like the Halo Band, a wearable gadget that gathers body information and dishes out advice. And when Amazon gets into a business, it doesn’t tend to just stick to the sidelines.
“This is another opportunity to gather up a huge cache of personal data to use that data and those relationships to further cement Amazon’s dominance as an online intermediary for lots of good and services,” said Stacy Mitchell, a sharp critic of the tech giant’s monopoly power who is co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Amazon’s cross-industry tentacles give a superpower to data to develop incredible insights about individuals — which it can use to find very precise ways to manipulate us and the economy. It probably isn’t the best idea to have our streaming services and health care come from the same company.
An Amazon spokesman declined to answer my question about how allowing one company to have so much of our data was good for consumers — or patients.
Amazon executives frequently say the company is driven by “customer obsession.” That might apply to delivering products in two days, but I’ve seen little evidence over the last decade that the company puts a priority on our privacy — or that it has the kind of ethical culture that can make the right choices about the human ramifications of its technology. There are so many examples: Amazon eavesdropping on our conversations, its Ring doorbells bringing police surveillance to our doorsteps and Amazon Sidewalk siphoning your internet connection without permission.
Amazon’s twisted priorities really hit home for me when a colleague and I reviewed the Halo, its first health device — and hands-down the most invasive tech I’ve ever tested. It asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice. No joke, it has a computer tell you if it thinks you sound “condescending.” It would be funny if it wasn’t a very serious possibility that this company may soon own my doctor’s office and have all my medical records.
For patients like me to trust Amazon as the owner of One Medical, Caplan suggested four big questions we need to know the answers to stat.
I’ll give Amazon and One Medical a month to convince me to stick around. After that, I’ll be on the hunt for a new doctor’s office.
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