Amazon pays $3.9 billion buying the healthcare provider One Medical

The American tech giant has announced that it will acquire One Medical, a provider of basic healthcare. The agreement would provide Amazon access to the startup’s technology for virtual doctor visits as well as a physical network of healthcare facilities and clinicians.

The new offering rounds out the business’s current healthcare offerings, which also include an online pharmacy and Amazon Care, a fictitious home emergency service. Privacy experts are worried about the ramifications of the tech giant obtaining patient medical information because it already knows what millions of consumers have purchased and requested Alexa to do.

One Medical has 767,000 customers, and a $199 yearly subscription fee is frequently levied to consumers. But the corporation is not profitable, according to the most recent quarterly report. One Medical’s parent company, 1Life Healthcare, received a 77 percent premium from Amazon’s $18 per share bid.

In recent years, other tech behemoths like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have also shown interest in the healthcare industry. They were drawn in by the industry’s enormous scale and the relative dearth of expert assistance. Regulators and privacy activists, however, who are worried about the increased access to private data kept by businesses, have also taken notice of the movements.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the abortion rights rule, this has gotten worse in recent weeks, raising concerns about how personal data might be used by government organizations to track and punish people who seek out reproductive health services, including abortions.

Six House Democrats asked information from Oracle and Amazon Web Services about their efforts to “respect the privacy rights of persons wanting to exercise their reproductive rights” in a letter sent on Wednesday.