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Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

nltimes.nl

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Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#101

Post by watwut »

timcobb wrote: post #94
mden wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what your point really was then? Belittling the idea of hotlines seemed central in your messaging and the possible exploitation of data more of a secondary thing. It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.

Sure, concretely, my point was that hotlines are a very capitalist feeling thing for me. Probably because of trying to deal with corporiations, from monopolies/utilities to things like airlines. My experience in this realm has been one of alienation. So, taking the hotline and applying it to people in suicidal crisis is like peak alienation in my mind. Personally, I'm not anti-capitalist, but capitalism to me is tied…

They are literally government paid social service you can call without additional charge. What the hell is capitalist about it?

Also Dutch give you health insurance beyond covid shot.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#102

Post by simonw »

_def wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #60

"Dutch suicide prevention hotline shares visitor data with tech companies" is certainly one way of saying "Dutch suicide prevention hotline website uses Google Analytics".

I get what you mean, but it's still perfectly accurate.

Sure it's accurate but it misleads people who only read the headlines. There are a bunch of comments in this Hacker News thread where the comment author seems to be assuming something a lot deeper than Google Analytics here.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#103

Post by giantg2 »

mden wrote: post #90
timcobb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they seem to work for many people. I don't mean to belittle that, I guess that is good. But, I'm not sure how that's interesting because "something works for somebody" is true for just about every category. For example, some people want to work at Palantir and find it interesting that some executive named Steve Cohen runs the AC at 60 degrees and eats ice cubes all day to aid cognition[0]. There's a very wide di…

Can you explain what your point really was then? Belittling the idea of hotlines seemed central in your messaging and the possible exploitation of data more of a secondary thing. It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.

Not the OP, but I saw it as a bandaid. Creating a hotline vs fixing underlying societal issues is a quick fix but doesn't fix the real drivers of the longterm increases.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#104

Post by kbelder »

"How many people came to our contact page, but left without calling the hotline?"

"Don't know, boss. We'd need to add analytics."

"Like what?"

"Google Analytics? It's free and pretty much universal."

"Ok, do it."

It's just standard. Not great, and Google uses the data in all sorts of ways that they don't make obvious. But it's not a cabal of evil website owners selling data to tech giants. They're just trying to run their websites and they're using industry standard, free services to do so. It doesn't cross their mind that they're helping google build individual profiles to sell targeted ads.

I'd love for self-hosted analytics to really get a foothold, not just for the increased privacy, but also because all the tech giants cripple your access to the data they collect off your own site.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#105

Post by frereubu »

mothballed wrote: post #55
gowld wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hotline is isn't "selling" the data. The hotline installed analytics software to help them do their job. Do "non-Western culture have a better solution to suicidality?

A quick sweep of the lowest 20 countries in suicide and the most obvious thing that can be teased out is they're by vast majority extremely conservative societies where family and religion (mostly Islam) would likely dominate the goals of any person living there (with a couple exceptions). Only about half of the lowest 10 have any sort of functional welfare or state support programs. I wonder if having a pretty rigid…

There's a very real risk that data from conservative societies, which often see suicide as shameful, is underreporting the actual level. If a family is going to be looked down on if one of its members kills themselves, there's a strong motivation to attribute the death to another cause if at all possible.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#106

Post by timcobb »

watwut wrote: post #101
timcobb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, concretely, my point was that hotlines are a very capitalist feeling thing for me. Probably because of trying to deal with corporiations, from monopolies/utilities to things like airlines. My experience in this realm has been one of alienation. So, taking the hotline and applying it to people in suicidal crisis is like peak alienation in my mind. Personally, I'm not anti-capitalist, but capitalism to me is tied…

They are literally government paid social service you can call without additional charge. What the hell is capitalist about it? Also Dutch give you health insurance beyond covid shot.

> What the hell is capitalist about it?

The rest, everything else.

It's darkly amusing to me we don't get healthcare here in the US but we do get suicide hotlines.

EDIT: wouldn't be surprised if Trump defunded/privatized suicide hotlines using companies run by the Trump Org.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#107

Post by enricozb »

The NL Times just translates Dutch articles and editorializes them for a (mostly American) audience. They should be consistently taken with skepticism. In this case, as other commenters have pointed out, this is "just" Google Analytics.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#108

Post by vanschelven »

simonw wrote: post #98
vanschelven wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Analytics as well as Microsoft, which indeed makes "tech companies". What are you implying here really?

The headline as written implies active sharing, at first glance it sounds like an active conspiracy between the website and Google. Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.

Dropping Google Analytics on a page is indeed precisely active sharing of data with Google; it just happens to use your own browser against you rather than sending the data to Google from the server of the website.

There's no "active conspiracy" needed as long as this kind of behavior keeps being normalized by comments like the above.

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#109

Post by danaw »

cm2012 wrote: post #96

Another name for this article title: Dutch suicide prevention website uses bog-standard industry analytics that share absolutely no PII and threatens no one. No individual can be found who's actually experienced harm from this.

"Until recently, 113 shared this data with third parties, including Google, even if visitors did not give consent via cookies."

that's a violation of GDPR and also kinda suss

Re: Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent

#110

Post by philipwhiuk »

gowld wrote: post #47
timcobb wrote: post #32

It's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call. It's like some joke from gonzo journalism come to fruition. I don't know what the answer is, but as a person who's been suicidal, for me it wasn't a hotline. It's even more fitting, if not kind of perfect, that said hotlines farm your data and sell it. :chef's kiss: what else is there to say. Like just about everything else, c…

The hotline is isn't "selling" the data. The hotline installed analytics software to help them do their job. Do "non-Western culture have a better solution to suicidality?

They're exchanging the data for a service.

That's a sale, a very old form of sale, called bartering.

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