[topspin]

> when did making profits become unethical?

It's literally a nonprofit. If they earn a profit or facilitate some other profit earning enterprise it is unethical, by definition. In a just world it would also be illegal and prosecuted.

[stjohnswarts]

I hate to burst your bubble but even nonprofits have to make profits (aka money) to stay afloat and pay bills and "get the word out". If you want to argue over accounting terms rather than the popular sense of the word then you probably have the wrong debater as I don't argue over edge case semantics on HN, I leave that for other nerds.

[JWlrCk9PkipFTDq]

Does anyone apart from Crisis Text Line benefit financially from Loris? If so it's clearly unethical. Even ignoring the kind of service that CTL is and the extra ethical considerations that entails, the founders of and investors in Loris are using the work of volunteers at a non-profit to bootstrap a company that they will profit from without clearly explaining this to the volunteers and users of the service in advance. Evidently not illegal, but pretty clearly unethical.

Not to mention that they've said that Loris hasn't reached the contractual threshold to actually pay any money to CTL yet...

Edit: Even if it is CTL taking all of the profits from Loris I would consider that unethical without clearly informing everyone involved of how the data from the interaction would be used, and a 50 paragraph privacy statement doesn't count as "clear"