How Do We Decide When a Use of Data Is No Longer Ethical?

How would you feel if the words you wrote to someone while in a crisis—maybe you were suicidal, maybe you were newly homeless, maybe you were suffering from emotional abuse at home—were later used to train a customer support tool? 

Those emotions you might behaving right now were directed last month at Crisis Text Line, after the news outlet Politico reported that the nonprofit organization had been sharing anonymized conversational data with a for-profit venture that Crisis Text Line had itself spun off at an earlier date, in an attempt to one day boost the nonprofit's own funding. 

Today, on Lock and Code with host David Ruiz, we’re speaking with Courtney Brown, the former director of a suicide hotline network that was part of the broader National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, to help us understand data privacy principles for crisis support services and whether sharing this type of data is ever okay.