---
title: "A Suicide Hotline Is Sharing People’s Data With a For Profit Company"
description: "Crisis Text Line, one of the most popular suicide crisis hotline chat sources, is capitalizing on data collected from people experiencing true trauma and depression."
date: "2022-01-28"
modified: "2022-01-28"
authors:
  - name: "Lonnie Lee Hood"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/ahood"
url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/suicide-hotline-sharing-data"
categories:
  - "Health & Medicine"
tags:
  - "artificial intelligence"
  - "data"
  - "mental health"
  - "privacy"
---

# A Suicide Hotline Is Sharing People’s Data With a For Profit Company

![Crisis Text Line, one of the most popular suicide crisis hotline chat sources, is capitalizing on data collected from people experiencing true trauma and depression.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/suicide-hotline-sharing-data.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Getty Images\</em\>*

***Content warning:** This post contains references to suicide. You can [click here](<https://www.sprc.org/resources-patients-families-and-community-members>) for a list of resources from the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, which is not the service discussed in this post.*

In news that feels truly grim, [*Politico* published an exclusive report](<https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617>) this week that found the Crisis Text Line, one of the busiest suicide crisis hotlines, is sharing data collected from people experiencing trauma and depression with a related entity that's using the data to train customer service agents.

According to *Politico*'s reporting, the nonprofit has a for-profit spinoff called Loris.ai. The Crisis Text Line told *Politico* that any data it shares with Loris is stripped of details that could trace the data back to a person, thereby making it anonymous. The organization also claimed the info is used to better the customer service AI that Loris.ai sells.

But no matter the intention, such a sharing of personal data is ethically dubious and could be damaging.

"These are people at their worst moments," Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford University, told *Politico*. "Using that data to help other people is one thing, but commercializing it just seems like a real ethical line for a nonprofit to cross."

In 2019, researchers from the UK published [a study](<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3#author-information>) in the journal *Nature* that found it's often pretty easy to identify people in anonymized datasets.

"As the information piles up, the chances it isn’t you decrease very quickly," Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, one of the study’s authors, [told *MIT Technology Review*](<https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/23/134090/youre-very-easy-to-track-down-even-when-your-data-has-been-anonymized/>) at the time.

In addition, King told *Politico* that it's hard to say whether users of such a hotline — who the Crisis Text Line presents with a 50-paragraph privacy agreement — can give meaningful consent to such terms considering their mental health at that moment.

Crisis Text Line's vice president and general counsel Shawn Rodriguez told *Politico* that the nonprofit believes everything it's doing is above board.

"We view the relationship with Loris.ai as a valuable way to put more empathy into the world, while rigorously upholding our commitment to protecting the safety and anonymity of our texters," Rodriguez told *Politico*. He added that "sensitive data from conversations is not commercialized, full stop."

Despite the reassurances, one big question remains: Even if the data did make the software more effective, is selling stuff through customer service bots really so important that we'd greenlight the exploitation of people in a mental health crisis?

**More on questionable public safety:** [*DARE, Which Apparently Still Exists, Is Furious at a TV Show for Dumb Reasons*](<https://futurism.com/the-byte/dare-euphoria-drugs>)