[Barrin92]

Two sentences in that piece are particularly amazing taken together:

>"Data science and AI are at the heart of the organization — ensuring, it says, that those in the highest-stakes situations wait no more than 30 seconds before they start messaging with one of its thousands of volunteer counselors[...]"

>"Others questioned whether the people who text their pleas for help are actually consenting to having their data shared, despite the approximately 50-paragraph disclosure the helpline offers a link to when individuals first reach out."

They better start offering a speedreading course together with their suicide prevention service because otherwise that's hard to reconcile. In all seriousness, milking suicide prevention data in any shape or form to make more money, can we go any lower? There is only one legitimate way to handle data here, for law enforcement or medical professionals, otherwise delete it.

[LegitShady]

I'm not sure, if you're an organization targeting people in distress for suicide prevention help, you can pretend that those people are in a state of mind to agree to any disclosure to terms of use.

[freedomben]

Yep, humans are really good at rationalizing decisions made for other reasons. I'm sure the people doing that have convinced themselves that it's totally ethical because they're "saving lives" (using some twisted definition of "save")

[YeBanKo]

AI power text line for suicide seems horrible to me. Every time I am hit customer support and need to face AI first my stress level increases. AI powered virtual assistant seems like the worst thing that happened to customer support in the recent decade. Every time I listen to a presentation by some exec how introduction of AI assistant improved some performance metric of a customer support dept, I actually feel bad for customer and for tech industry, that helped bring this change closer.

> can we go any lower?

They can always offer estate planning services right there in the chat. I bet some lawyers would jump on this ad placement opportunity.

> There is only one legitimate way to handle data here, for law enforcement or medical professionals, otherwise delete it.

What about research? It would be hard to navigate and share it responsibly even with research facilities, but it is a very legitimate use case and potentially useful.