A Suicide Hotline Is Sharing People’s Data With a For Profit Company

There are references to suicide in this post. You can find a list of resources from the Suicide Prevention Resource Center here.

The Crisis Text Line, one of the busiest suicide crisis hotlines, is sharing data from people experiencing trauma and depression with a related entity that uses the data to train customer service agents.

The nonprofit has a for-profit spinoff calledLoris.ai. The data that the Crisis Text Line gives to Loris is stripped of details that could be used to trace the data back to a person. The organization claimed that the info is used to improve the customer service.

Sharing personal data is questionable and could be damaging.

The data that is used to help other people is one thing, but commercializing it seems like a contradiction.

A study published in the journal Nature found that it is easy to identify people in data sets.

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, one of the study's authors, told MIT Technology Review at the time that as the information piles up, the chances it isn't you decrease very quickly.

It's hard to say if users of the Crisis Text Line can give meaningful consent to such terms considering their mental state.

The vice president and general counsel of Crisis Text Line, Shawn Rodriguez, told Politico that the nonprofit believes everything it does is above board.

Rodriguez told Politico that they view the relationship withLoris.ai as a valuable way to put more empathy into the world, while rigorously uphold their commitment to protecting the safety and anonymity of their texters. He said that sensitive data from conversations is not commercial.

Even if the data did make the software more effective, is selling stuff through customer service bots really so important that we'd greenlight the exploitation of people in a mental health crisis?

DARE, which apparently still exists, is angry at a TV show for dumb reasons.

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