The Real Harm of Crisis Text Line's Data Sharing

Another week, another privacy horror show: Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit text message service for people experiencing serious mental health crises, has been using "anonymized" conversation data to power a for-profit machine learning tool for customer support teams. Crisis Text Line's response to the backlash focused on the data itself and whether it included personally identifiable information. But that response uses data as a distraction. That's the real travesty--when the price of obtaining mental health help in a crisis is becoming grist for a machine learning mill. And it's not just users of CTL who pay; it's everyone who goes looking for help when they need it most.