Crisis Text Line, a “charity” backed by Melinda Gates and Steve Ballmer, collects data from suicidal people, then sells it to advertisers, a customer relations software company, and other third parties.
The outfit claims that the “AI” chat data is “anonymized”, but similar datasets have been trivially de-anonymized in the past.
Even if the dataset has been stripped, allowing them to sell the contents to advertisers is clearly unethical.
Worse, they apparently encourage users to use the system over Facebook Chat, which is monitored by Facebook, which is world-renowned for the creepy, unethical, and illegal things it does to invade privacy. They’ve settled or been convicted of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act at least a couple of times, for example.
Imagine what a goldmine all of this stuff that people unwisely tell it while they’re depressed is worth.
Even the more official National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States acts unethically at times. For example, if a person definitely plans to kill themselves, they will attempt to dox that person and call the police.
If you’re reading this in a civilized country, you may go “Oh, well, what’s the harm in that?”.
"Even the more official National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the United States acts unethically at times. For example, if a person definitely plans to kill themselves, they will attempt to dox that person and call the police."Well, the police in America are not exactly famous for treating mentally-ill people well when they arrive on the scene*, as was the case in Michigan when they arrived and shot an unarmed man whose mother had called them for a wellness check.
*(I know. Someone called them for a “check” on me a long time ago and far from trying to do anything to calm or reassure me, they came out, screamed at me, and accused me of malingering and feeling sorry for myself. Shouting at people and trying to throw them off balance might make sense when they’re a suspect in a murder, but it’s ridiculous that the cops are allowed to do this during a wellness check, when a person has harmed nobody.)
And even if you survive the police encounter, they can stuff you in a nuthatch, force you to take barbaric and primitive psychotropic medication, and then give you the boot later on, perhaps after you’ve lost your job for failing to appear at work, and now you are indebted to the treatment center for roughly $20,000.
Ironically, they may have given you more reasons to kill yourself than you had before you called the hotline.
I can only surmise based on what I’ve witnessed here that the United States doesn’t really want to do anything about the growing problem of suicide, which does need to be talked about. It says it does, but it doesn’t.
It allows the 100 richest people to hoard trillions in (largely inherited or as the windfall of various white collar crime) wealth, but it won’t do anything to alleviate poverty.
Instead, we get this 9-8-8 number that just sounds like it could turn your life into even more of a shitshow than the reason you called it for, and the 1% (Including Bill Gates’s ex-wife Melinda, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer) running a competing disservice that sucks up your data, packages it, and sells it, so that advertisers know what makes people tick.
It makes me wonder, if they’re allowed to sell it, who else they would be selling it to.
"Could it be that not too long from now, the Crisis Text Line and Facebook will offer to tell them everything people have typed into this?"There are already companies that copy out all of your Twitter and Facebook posts, likes, and shares, and go combing through it for “red flags”, and then sending it to your employer or potential employer.
Could it be that not too long from now, the Crisis Text Line and Facebook will offer to tell them everything people have typed into this?
It really should stop and give you pause about how you should not interact with things like this. If there wasn’t some way to profit off of this human suffering, the billionaire class wouldn’t be investing in it. ⬆