Thread by @QuinnyPig

"Why is @Amazon acquiring @OneMedical bad news?"

Let's explore.

1. Horizontal integration at Amazon scale of a company that now has the right to access my medical records under HIPAA opens up a huge problem for abuse.

2. Amazon has a policy against using seller-specific data to “aid [its'] private label business,” but Jeff Bezos testified to Congress that he “can't guarantee” that such a policy has “never been violated.”

Now extend that to your medical data.

3. With access to health care now under attack in a variety of states, do you want your medical data handled by a company who has warehouses and customers in those states (read as: vulnerable to pressure)?

4. Related to pressure, if you openly criticize Amazon are you sure that some upset exec won't go browsing through your medical file? I mean *REALLY* sure?

I'm not.

5. I once wrote that "You Can't Trust Amazon When It Feels Threatened." Extend that to what the $1.244T company might do when it has a bad quarter or two. The potential for misuse / abuse is MASSIVE.

lastweekinaws.com/blog/you-cant-…

6. HIPAA protects medical records from external disclosure. It’s unclear to me about what internal restrictions, if any, apply to that data.

“You’ve got terminal cancer, no need to send you an Amazon Prime renewal.”

7. This entire thread could now plausibly be neutralized by an Amazon PR rep tweeting “ignore Corey, that’s just the syphilis talking.”

8. You sure do have a lot of medical issues that require time away from work. I wonder why Amazon Recruiting never reaches out to you to schedule a job interview. Must be a coincidence.

Since this thread is going beyond my usual circles, a bit of context:

I'm an external Amazon observer, specifically AWS. I snark about them, but I also think a lot of what they do is admirable.

I'm rarely alarmist about things like this, and I don't have an axe to grind.

I believe that the overwhelming majority of Amazonians are excellent humans with high integrity.

I also believe that mistakes happen, and that Machine Learning® is excellent at occluding inappropriate uses of data.