"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.
Almost noone is really "evil" in this stereotypical way, it is a thoroughly unhelpful way to view these things, it's more like criminal negligence that people who work for the government to handle medical data still don't know or don't care that google analytics sends data to google after 20 years of google analytics existing, and that the government as a whole does not have systems in place to enforce data privacy and hold people accountable who violate it.
Some time more than 10 years ago, industry standard moved away form Linux, Apache, open source, etc. to big-tech. Many developers attending conferences cannot differentiate propaganda (Facebook connected, Google I/O, etc.) from a technical presentation . And they moved all their stack to software and hardware that is not under their control. A total failure of engineering but a big win for shareholders.
At some point we have to get used to the idea that there are no such thing as free services. If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.
> If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.
Then we should get used to the idea that even when you're paying a lot of money for something the entity taking your money will still do everything and anything to extract even more value from you including collecting and selling your data, remotely disabling features of the thing you paid for so they can start charging you a monthly fee to get them back, aggressively infesting the product with ads, pushing updates that degrade the service to incentivize you to upgrade, etc.
The greed of companies and their shareholders will never be satisfied so ultimately what we need are real consumer protections in the form of powerful regulation and enforcement.
I think the best-faith assumption was they were taking about the use of Google analytics. For the suicide prevention website, the value is the benefit to society of you not killing yourself.
Paying the danegeld logic. They are more than happy to charge you money and spy on you. See Windows 11, Bambu printers making every print go through their cloud, smart TVs reporting on what you watch, cars tattling on where you're driving, and countless other examples.
This kind of thing is why I wouldn't touch a site like that. Websites, service providers, and internet-connected software that collects data from you can't be trusted even a little, so I avoid them to the greatest degree I can. The rule of thumb is that anything you tell to them, or any data you have put in their custody, is at risk.
Even if you're in the US and make a phone call to a suicide prevention hotline the fact that you called them, how many times you called them, and how long you spoke with them can end up in the hands of data brokers. That data will never go away and it can impact your employment, your insurance, be used against you in court, etc.
People in the middle of a mental health crisis shouldn't have worry that trying to get help will cause a black mark on their permanent record with lifelong consequences but that's exactly what surveillance capitalism has enabled.
It's not supposed to happen, your call records should be secure, but of course it happens all the time
unsure why you are being downvoted. this is universally true. your data is either being actively shared with partners, or inadvertently shared in the form of weak security, exploits, wide-open buckets, etc.
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, callous people make money while vulnerable, sensitive people pay up. Beautiful world we live in ;). Please drink responsibly!
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 diversity of people out there, so the fact that some find this appealing is not interesting or surprising.
So, the question, in my mind, is less that something works for somebody, and more about the broader meaning of this civilizational function.
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.
Most people don't believe in incremental progress anymore, either it works 100% of the time and solves everything forever or it's a failure and you probably wanted it to fail because you're evil.
No I believe that what you have with the 11 percent decrease is reflective of diversity among people and what causes crisis. Suicide hotlines work for some people in some cases, that is undeniable. But it's not incremental in that you're not going to then iterate on the hotline and make it more effective and one day we've got 20% and so on. That won't be the case because the hotline is just not appealing for many people. It's good for the people it's good for, but that doesn't mean it's not a civilizational CYA/"not my problem".
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.
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 up conceptually with money and expedience. Feelings, in my opinion, are sort of in a different human realm.
But yes, for sure, that alienation as I allege it, is probably good for many people in crisis who are uncomfortable with the people around them. However, the question of why it is that such people aren't comfortable with anyone around them is the bigger one in my mind.
> Please drink responsibily
To me, although they work, suicide hotlines appear to be a naked corporate CYA, just like gambling and other addiction hotlines. Civilization will beat you down, won't give you health insurance except for a few free COVID shots (then, suddenly, people can totally mobilize to administer collective healthcare), but hey when you've just about had it, here's a hotline you can call (and we'll sell your data hahahahaha sucker).
Existence, where you're just thrown out there to sink or swim and that's thats. If you're lucky you have parents and/or friends who can help you. If you're not, well... good luck!
I didn't think that in Netherlands, Germany or France you can live like a normal person if you are, say, depressed or addicted to drugs and don't want to or can't work.
An 11% drop isn't "something works for somebody," it's "it works for a lot of people, substantially more people than it harms, making for a clear net gain."
In individual with odd habits is a completely different thing. That comparison is utterly inapt.
If you had an entire population that started running the AC at 60 degrees and eating ice cubes all day, and cognition measurably increased by 11%, that would be incredible news.
To be clear I'm not saying it's not a net gain. It's very clearly a net gain.
But, just because it works doesn't mean it's not a capitalism solution using the capitalism hammer of talking to random people behind a phone (which, again, might be a net good thing for some people crisis).
So again, I am not against anti-suicide hotlines. I am sincerely happy they help many people. I just think they are very symbolically representative of our capitalist alienated world where everything, down to our very drive to exist, has a corporate CYA hedge hotline.
It is interesting because while the hotline might help some, it can also do significant damage to others depending on what happens after the phone call. Of course, nothing in life is every 100% good for everyone or every situation.
While not everyone that calls the hotline is involuntarily committed, I wonder how the data matches up with this finding [1]:
> "In this meta-analysis of 100 studies of 183 patient samples, the postdischarge suicide rate was approximately 100 times the global suicide rate during the first 3 months after discharge and patients admitted with suicidal thoughts or behaviors had rates near 200 times the global rate. Even many years after discharge, previous psychiatric inpatients have suicide rates that are approximately 30 times higher than typical global rates."
Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place? It seems obvious, but it doesn't sound like they are.
People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population, but that doesn't imply that hospital treatment is damaging.
> Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place?
How certain are you that this is a fact? I agree that is seems like common sense on the surface, but that might not be the case. The closest I could find in the study was this:
> However, the findings should curb enthusiasm for restrictive interventions directed at patients labeled as having high risk of suicide by virtue of demographic or clinical variables. Our figures suggest that 0.28% of all discharged patients can be expected to commit suicide during the first 3 months after discharge. The modest statistical strength of suicide risk assessment means that even patients who are classified as having high risk because of their suicide risk factors will have a low absolute probability of suicide over clinically meaningful time frames, whereas patients with a low risk for suicide will still have a probability of suicide that is many times that in the general community.
It also seems that largest factor, and perhaps a better determinant of severity, is the number of times one is (re)admitted.
> People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population
How much higher?
Do you think this statement is comparable to cancer treatment?
> Our data suggest that the suicide rates among discharged patients have not decreased in the past 50 years. This is a disturbing finding considering the increase in community psychiatry and the availability of a range of new treatments during this period.
I think this is the take away from the study that is also important:
> However, the very high suicide rates calculated in this study and the known limitations of suicide risk assessment suggest that a focus on clinical risk assessment might mislead clinicians into thinking that some patients can be regarded as having low risk after discharge. Our findings better support the views of authors who believe in a more universal approach to suicide prevention that might focus on periods of high risk but that extends for periods of years.
Also, I need to clarify one thing. I apologize for any confusion. I realized how half-finished my initial comment was. I did not mean to imply the damage from facilities comes from treatments per se, though there are still risks with all treatments. I should have clarified that damage can occur from the systems surrounding the facility. The (incorrect) stigma surrounding admission, the potential police interventions, the medical debt from being admitted, loss of certain rights/job prospects, etc.. Yes, the facilities do help some individuals, that is their purpose, but some people are hesitant to say, call the hotline, out of fear of being committed, which can also be damaging.
I'm quite confident that people admitted to institutions for suicidal thoughts are much more prone to suicide.
But it doesn't actually matter to my point. It's a very reasonable hypothesis, true or not. It needs to be addressed as a potential confounding factor, either by showing it's not true, or by showing that the size of the observed effect is greater than the effect from the confounding factor.
To me, the hotline is an absolute joke and one of the last things I would do if I were contemplating harming myself. I've often wondered if there is hard data showing it is effective overall, or whether it's just bandwagon group think run amok.
I have lost a number of friends to suicide, and as a result I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what could have been done to have helped them before it was too late. In nearly all cases, it was pretty well thought out and not a spur of the moment thing. In some cases, they even took steps to prevent people from discovering their plans. So anecdotally, a suicide hotline would not have helped at all.
Based on some searching though, it seems like there is data showing that it helps on the whole. I guess for people who are having a spur of the moment thought, it might be potentially helpful. However I also found some people saying that seeing the prolific messages about calling the hotline when searching for information about things really pushed them away and somewhat backfired.
I guess ultimately this is a very complex issue with no one size fits all solution. If I ever get to a point where I no longer have to work, this is a cause I would love to work on for the people that tend to think it through more and less spontaneous.
Having an option to talk to someone when you're alone and having trouble getting out of your own head is a great option. If you don't know what to do and you only see death as the option, having someone give you options seems like a good thing to have available at a relatively low cost.
I don't think anyone is expecting this to "solve suicide" but it sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?
Calling a therapist is similar to a "hotline" but you need to have a therapist first, which is a pain in the ass. Making that easier would be a good concrete second step (which a hotline can also help with!)
"sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?"
There seem to be many things that we could do, like addressing suicide as a social contagion including in media portrayal, providing better substance abuse and mental health treatment options, etc. A hotline is like a bandaid - its not going to fix the underlying societal issues like disconnection, lack of community, lack of opportunity/hope, social media, etc.
Disconnection, lack of community / opportunity / hope and social media are all major societal issues that (in my opinion) are not going to be solved by any sort of single government or charity. Making progress on that takes shifting norms / moving the overton window on depression and addiction, and overriding a lot of human nature (we like easy, we like saccharine, etc).
Definitely open to whatever concrete ideas you have that would fix those things, especially if they don't require a nation's whole GDP.
What’s your point? Okay, the hotline is a bandage, but that’s entirely the point, you use it when you’re feeling suicidal and you need to talk to someone. You don’t use it to fix structural issues in your life that lead to you feeling like that.
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"
What on earth is the "industrial complex" part about this? Outside of pharma pushing pills I'm not sure what other profit-seeking, recursive elements exist in the "suicide prevention industry".
Legitimately curious about this - not sure how these words would apply.
Not entirely sure what the GP meant either, but maybe it's like sports betting? Where some companies are heavily advertising and trying to get people to become "responsible gamblers" (addicted), meanwhile, some of those same companies are investing in mental health treatment facilities on the side. Thus, those gambling companies can make money off gambling addicts and when gambling addicts try to quit. As the saying goes, the house always wins.
I think many people, not all, who are labeled “mentally ill” are just more attuned to the truth that society is depressing and anxiety inducing. In other words, the so called normal people are the crazy ones. But we define mental illness relative to how well someone can function in society, that’s literally how the DSM is used, even though society is clearly mad and perverse and 10 minutes on Twitter or reading the news is more than enough evidence to draw that conclusion. Every tech CEO or celebrity or successful person could be diagnosed with a multitude of mental illnesses, but because they’re “productive” members of society we glorify them instead. Explain to me how it’s normal and healthy to work 100 hours a week, take ketamine and adderall and other hardcode drugs regularly, post rants on the Internet at 3am, go make a decision that hurts or kills thousands of people, and then hit up the golf club after.
Then we take the people who notice all of this madness and tell them they’re crazy, ill, and malfunctioning. We put them in this Kafkaesque nightmare of gaslighting that probably does drive them mad over time.
I don’t want to say that if you’re hearing voices telling you to do things that you’re ok, but if you just feel depressed or anxious I think there’s a good chance you’re just awake to the sickness of society that most people are still in denial about and it might make you feel better to know you’re not the broken one. You still need to figure out how to adapt to the world, but just knowing you’re not broken gives you a foundation to build from.
I understand the point you make but I would counter that being happy doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of the world and injustice around you. It doesn’t mean that you condone it, think it’s good, etc. It does mean you probably avoid self-destructive behaviors like excess drug use, poor sleep, etc.
Many happy people are also agitators for change.
Not to say that happiness is a choice, but you can certainly make choices which make you sick with anxiety. It’s a disordered behavior to purposefully reinforce your sadness and anxiety about the world for no useful reason.
For instance, many people feel compelled to expose themselves to the horror of certain ongoing events constantly, via video. There are whole subreddits dedicated to it, on every side of most conflicts. At the end of the day, that is neither healthy nor productive, solely self-traumatizing. One reason this is a pernicious behavior is because it feels like there is righteousness in being a witness, but in reality it’s no different than self-harm.
I wasn't going to comment, but this is just too dumb on too many levels.
The hotline is not the way to deal with suicidality - suicidality is a longer process and something you can ask your GP about and most help is covered under most western versions of universal health care.
The hotline is an idea that intervenes in the last steps of a suicide process. The idea can reach into the moment where people have convinced themselves they're stuck - and they can reach out with extremely low effort or barrier to entry.
If you have some better 'idea' we can spread into the culture that does this better, then by all means enlighten us.
---
You could have made a case and started a discussion how too many people see the existence of the hotline as _the_ way to deal with suicidality, but you didn't. You just decided to spread some shallow vibe nonsense.
The NYT released an article[0], sorry paywalled, that discusses the effectiveness of the 988 hotline in lowering the number of suicides where it is available. Sadly, because of the joke that is mental health coverage in the US, that's as good of news as I've got for you. Mental health coverage isn't even available on the open market AMA (Obama Care), so 988 is the best we can offer.
What do you advocate for to help people contemplating suicide? WHat do non-Western culture do to "deal with suicidality"? The issue is when the hotline is selling the data and not that the hotline itself exists.
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, straightforward, and achievable set of life goals lowers suicide. This isn't to say that's the best way to live, but I could understand how it may make people more satisfied with their life.
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.
In between is a table that shows the suicide rate is much lower in "upper middle income" countries than in either poorer or richer countries. I suspect that is a pointer. Affluent enough not to be constantly struggling, but different in some ways (urbanisation? materialism? isolation?) from the rich countries.
You also need to look at other factors. Conservative countries have younger populations, so you need to correct for that. Not all countries have equally accurate statistics.
I think conservative countries may have an advantage because of larger families, extended families, fewer people being single (and less isolated if they are) etc. but it needs more data. There are some pretty conservative countries with high rates.
I've heard the Dutch one is is a little better. The ones in the USA aren't likely to do much more than call police to put a mental hold on you, during which the hospital will rack up so many bills that it would make anyone suicidal. And then yay, your gun rights gone forever, so if you are suicidal in part because you live in a dangerous impoverished shithole good luck defending yourself afterwards!
> Many people in mental health crisis fear that if they dial 988, law enforcement might show up or they might be forced to go to the hospital.
> But getting sent that kind of "involuntary emergency rescue" happens to around 1% of callers, suggests new data from Vibrant Emotional Health, the administrator of the 988 Lifeline for suicide and mental health crises.
I don't think that's the right way to consider your odds of involuntary committal. It really depends on what you say in the calls. The more immediate and serious the danger the more likely you are to be involuntary committed. The caller range is quite large.
What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
If they dispatch you to an institution you could lose your job just when you need money to pay for the bills you'll be sent.
With some careers, like being a pilot, you'd never be be to find another job.
You'd lose your ability to take out life insurance (even if it was a short temporary depression that you got over, like a side effect of a medication, the life insurance companies won't care.)
Or the institution's records could be hacked and you'll live in fear of your friends and family finding out.. which could cause rebound suicidal ideation...
There is no way I would ever call these hotlines unless it were 100% anonymous.
> What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
Is there actually any consequence free conversations? Even Lawyers can break confidentiality in some situations. I'm not saying that the hotline is perfect, I'm saying that it provides a lot of good. I hope you never feel the need to call the hotline, but it's an option that saves a lot of lives.
I think that's what strippers are for. Come in, pay in cash, say whatever, no paper trail or telephone logs, then leave. They're not mandatory reporters like doctors or licensed professionals and therapists are. From the ones I've known, this is no-shit what a lot of people use them for.
Yep, as someone who suffers from depression and suicidal ideation regularly its been made very clear to me on multiple occasions that I would rather be in this state than interface with involuntary committal. I don't know what points you are looking to score here.
I get it, I am not advocating to live unmedicated or anything, but pretty much every emergency medical experience I have had any contact with in the USA has been so universally painful and dehumanizing that it gives me extreme pause, I would not willingly engage with it.
I'm fine with someone making that call for themselves with personal experience, although doing it in a sound state of mind can be challenging in crisis.
I'd just caution you that it's not a universal experience. As with, say, COVID masking, some people found it abhorrent, and others still voluntarily mask today; some found lockdowns almost fun, others despised even the thought of staying home for a few days.
Statistically, police/committment intervention from calling the hotline is rare, and another commenter linked evidence (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122550) of significant benefits to balance it.
Gun rights are generally not gone forever. Federal law bars people adjudicated mentally defective or formally committed to a mental institution, neither of which include a temporary mental hold for suicide watch. State laws vary, but none of them have a law where a single temporary hold means "gun rights gone forever." Some states let people go buy a gun the day they are released from suicide watch, despite how irresponsible that sounds.
The temporary can easily turn into an adjudicated one. Happened to one of my friends during a nasty divorce, the high-IQ husband knew all the buttons to press to the state and kept fabricating to the state that the suicidal ideation was ongoing (it never existed in the first place) and then they committed my friend based on that. He was then successful in getting my friend's ability to defend herself removed so that she would be defenseless.
So from what i understand the only way your gun rights are "gone forever" is if a court ordered you to go to a mental hospital. If it's just a 911 call and a ride to the hospital (every trip to the "grippy sock hotel" I've ever seen), that does not apply and your gun rights are not removed federally. Some states have "red flag" laws but to my understanding those are temporary and end either after a time period or a court petition. I'm curious what laws you're talking about in the US that would take your gun rights for a suicide call.
E.g. NY is not friendly in this scenario depending on the type of permit and the type of hold. An involuntary hold will impact your right to have a gun.
Involuntary commitment. Happened to a good friend of mine during a nasty divorce, the husband made up a suicidal story and my friend was committed without the court appointing her a lawyer to defend herself. She's struggling to get her rights back, it is apparently possible, but they're gone forever until you spend a lot of money on lawyers so it's true it's not strictly the case you can't get them back but they default to staying gone forever.
This is just another form of stigma. Better to go without getting treated for mental health issues, or that very responsible decision to seek treatment will be used against you later.
See also the jump seat pilot who tried to pull the fire handles on a commercial flight.
In The Netherlands you can be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital due to risk of suicide, still get a weapons license, buy half a dozen guns and then go on a shooting rampage killing 7 and wounding 17 (Alphen a/d Rijn shooting, 2011).
This is not a comment on gun rights, but, IF you are having issues with suicide and depression I would absolutely remove those weapons from your house and access. Talk to a friend you trust. Have them stored. Something. Having them nearby is only going to increase the odds you end up dead.
They follow a flowchart. Most of it involves trying to figure out if you know any friends or family nearby. I guess finding someone for comfort might make sense, but the flowchart is too obvious and makes it sound like another typical marketing callcenter.
Seems like one of those situations where damned if they do, damned if they don't, isn't it? Like if someone is in immediate crisis what do you expect them to do?
I feel like if someone is calling a line, they are looking for intervention. If someone cries for help and the response is ensuring that someone doesn't fearmonger on Hacker News, I feel like that would be a problem.
"And then yay, your gun rights gone forever"
Gun owners are much more likely to kill themself with said gun than to ever defend themselves in any way, and anyone who has ideations should be the last person to want a gun. And suicide mostly afflicts white middle-aged males, most of whom don't live in "dangerous impoverished shitholes". I doubt the correlation is more than random.
I do want to mention though, while this is bad, I feel like we're singling out a site. Fact is, I've seen more places where this doesn't happen. Though, not at places that have such a strong social mission as this one. And while I've done my best to work at those places to get it fixed, there is a lot of inertia and simply ignorance. I'm not talking about small places either. I'm talking about non-tech places that make their profit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The inertia, the fact that no one else seems to care at such a place. It's an issue. Then I'm always the odd one out and looked at funny. When it's fixed no one really gives a shit and now I'm "that guy". A small form of resentment stays in these people.
Just mentioning my experience. It's stuff like this kind of apathy that gets us a world where a place like a suicide hotline just ignorantly does this kind of stuff. Or at least, that's my hypothesis: it's ignorance and apathy.
There's probably not a lot of data on this which is why I'm sharing this anecdata. I hope it's better than nothing.
Other websites with similar societal impacts and responsibilities have already been covered in Dutch news before, from governments to health information websites to healthcare providers.
The 113 suicide prevention hotline works together with professionals but it's not an official health care provider as far as I know.
There are probably plenty of similar websites with similar problems, but 113 is well known within the Netherlands so it's a poignant example to use in the media.
Getting media coverage on this will probably make these organizations do better, at least until the next conversion improvement marketeer gets access to the backend.
Their chat service uses something called "sprinklr.com", blocked by my filters automatically, which calls itself "The definitive AI‑native platform for extraordinary customer experiences".
I have a similar outlook atm as one of "those guys."
Everything takes so long, nobody is held accountable. The most likely result of pushing for any type of positive outcome for basically anything is some form of punishment or social degradation.
And so, as of October 2024, I don't do it anymore.
I will also note that most of the things I see "being corrected" these days are entirely fictitious.
As an example is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada. They tossed out a valid complaint about Shaw (during Rogers buyout) for jurisdictional reasons. Then they are on the news making odd statements about (exclusively) OpenAI not being honest about using your data?
It's all a show it seems. I figured it needs to get a qhole lot worse before it can get any better.
I have moved to internal tooling creation and have airgapped a machine/tool each month this year so far. Just a laptop and my social phone remain networked.
There are times where working on the inside to make changes is a valid strategy, but it is definitely trending down, especially if there's just a single voice. The only other option is the public shaming route, but they've pretty much gotten to the point of being able to survive that as well now. It takes significant numbers to move the needle, but there have been recent examples of companies reacting to negative press.
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.
Data Protection Authority (DPA) should investigate. In Germany, the company's DPO (Data Protection Officer) has personal, criminal liability. For these cases, I'd like to see them in front of criminal court, and see what happens. I wanna see someone having a criminal record for this, and then all the stupid excuses of large companies about "I didn't know" and "I thought lalalala" will stop rather quickly. It will turn out that, at the end of the day, it was just a resource issue. And when criminal liability is on the table, resources magically... appear.
I thought Europe was more careful about things like this. This is pretty bad, these people are vulnerable and they're just mining they're data for profit.
I guess it didn't help enough to stop them from doing it in the first place--it just helped them stop once they were caught. Sure, it's a step up from other places where there is literally no consequence for this kind of sharing.
This is a rare circumstance where I would actually assume incompetence vs malice. (Unlike big tech, which has weaponized good will)
I would hope that anyone medical adjacent would be more deliberate in building a service, but I can easily imagine following the same ad-infested path as everyone else. “Start with this Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Draft Kings starter template that bundles leftpad so you can save time for the hard work”
> This website uses cookies
> We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features
I know there are some services that send GDPR data removal requests on your behalf. I wonder if there are any similar services that send messages like "Why the hell do you need these cookies?" to website operators.
I hardly ever see these cookie banners as my browser blocks most of them, but I still think it would be great to rub the idea of "Your website doesn't need any non-technical cookies" in website operators' faces.
"Dutch suicide prevention hotline shares visitor data with tech companies" is certainly one way of saying "Dutch suicide prevention hotline website uses Google Analytics".
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.
> Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.
It absolutely is that website deciding to trade data about their visitors in exchange for getting something for free. That's "active sharing" in my book.
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.
You say that like there's a difference. You say that like the detail of data that Google Analytics farms is acceptable. You say that like what Google does with the data is acceptable. Just because companies want the data doesn't mean they deserve it.
What does Google do with analytics data that's not acceptable to you?
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397 says "Regardless of your data sharing settings, your Analytics data may also be used only insofar as necessary to Maintain and protect the Analytics service."
Selling the fact that you visited a suicide prevention website to anyone who cares to buy it. Google analytics knows exactly who you are the second you access a site that uses Analytics.
You don't have to be logged in. You don't even have to be a Google customer. They have IP and browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify people through aggregation of all their sources.
OK, there is a feasible way this could happen. Google would need to be using IP address plus browser device fingerprinting to identify users who visit Google Analytics sites, and would then need to be packaging that data to sell to advertisers.
I don't believe they do this, partly because if they did it would be something they would want to actively promote as a product to advertisers. Why do the creepy thing if you can't talk about it to make more money?
All they have is that there was a hit from an IP at a specific date and time. Any cookies they set will let them tell that the same browser came back an hour later - but won't let them join traffic together across multiple sites.
I thought the same thing but it's still not a good look. The big tech companies offering this sort of thing should probably find ways to give better guarantees about data isolation, even if that requires e.g. clients paying additional fees.
Sounds like analytics data. The screen recordings of visits I particularly but. I despise when companies do that and act as if it's a normal thing. It might help your support when a user reports an issue but it's a massive violation of a user privacy and most users wouldn't have any idea it was even possible.
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.
I have lately thought about how the only tech I am interested in now is to assist programming. Programming for programming. Eternal yak shaving. And a big part of that is that end-user digital technology is a dystopia. No, not dystopic, not going in a bad direction. Just dystopia. Vultures and thugs at every corner preying on every “convenience” and mistake that you could make.
It is also good for mindless entertainment in between the real things that sometimes happen. And listening to music.
For example version control. That’s the kind of the thing that I read about and want to program myself. Things that have nothing to do with end-user software.
> Stichting 113 likely violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by sharing this data. The GDPR states that extra care must be taken regarding the security of medical personal data, which includes contact with an anonymous suicide prevention hotline.
This is quite sad to think about in multitude of ways :-(
What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice. There are so many competent & great dutch engineers and engineers in general, I refuse to believe that they couldn't find anyone ethical enough to take extra care regarding GDPR and sensitivity of the data in general.
> “At this moment, we are investigating what happened, how this could have occurred, what the potential impact has been, and what our next steps are,” the spokespersons aid. They didn’t say whether the trackers would be turned on again
I hope the investigation that they are saying in the articles goes swiftly to really find out the real reason as to why this ended up happening in first place and the reasons behind it are made public sooner rather than later.
See my comment. My hypothesis is: ignorance and apathy that results in incompetence.
Using GA4 is just the normal thing right?
Look in a room full of marketing experts and they will say yes or shrug.
Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
To answer: no GA4 is not just the normal thing. There is no normal. It's the dominant thing and it invades privacy like hell and the whole thing needs to be thought about in a different way. I'd advice almost everyone to stop smoking that Google crack pipe and roll your own or find an analytics friendly vendor.
Yea I got a bit rhetorical there, apologies for being a bit fed up with this situation.
Yes, my comment was published just one minute after yours so I only saw your comment after mine and I appreciated reading your comment (& upvoted it)
> Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
But if that's the case, are we saying that when the website was being created, it was being created with no-one who was security expert or let alone security adjacent people?
This is what I had refused to believe because in my opinion, more due diligence within the structure should've taken place and if there was no-one competent within the team, then why not hire one who is?
I can't help but feel frustrated, this is probably gonna negatively impact people who have talked on such suicide prevention websites.
Literally these websites is to create a safe space and for a person to be heard, if one introduces the concept of tracking or even feeling tracked, I can't help but feel frustrated as to why, why not hire people who know about security especially for such websites and especially with these laws. I am unable to understand this to be more specific.
Marketing people like the features they're getting, and Google and Meta are dominant, so big that they're the default, in the same way that we talk about github being the default option, and "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM / (big tech company of your choosing)". I wouldn't dream of saying they should choose something else, without researching and guaranteeing that nothing they'd ever want from GA (and they may not know everything they'll want in the future right now) is missing in the alternative. In a role (marketing) that's completely out of my wheelhouse. So I don't even bother.
Not all websites are created with IT in the loop. And sometimes even if IT is in the loop, then they aren't privacy/security conscious enough.
I got to see this first-hand being part of a marketing department. IT was explicitly left out of the loop. Though that was a Fortune 500 company. I'm not saying it's the same situation for the organization of this article.
My point simply is: IT is not always in the loop when a site gets created. And I bet "not always" is putting it mildly.
Tribalism is a thing. Or at least, I call it tribalism.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". It's that kind of stuff, unfortunately.
> What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice. There are so many competent & great dutch engineers and engineers in general, I refuse to believe that they couldn't find anyone ethical enough to take extra care regarding GDPR and sensitivity of the data in general.
Ask 100 random developers to setup a website, and to make sure the website owner should be able to see how many people visit the website, and probably 90 of those developers will default to setting up Google Analytics, just by "instinct".
People generally just continue with whatever they've learned, not revisiting the default choices they make, and it's been ingrained over decades that "Google Analytics is the best way to optimize your sales funnel" or whatever the marketers drink nowadays, so it'll take some time for these folks to revisit their decisions.
> People generally just continue with whatever they've learned, not revisiting the default choices they make, and it's been ingrained over decades that "Google Analytics is the best way to optimize your sales funnel" or whatever the marketers drink nowadays, so it'll take some time for these folks to revisit their decisions.
Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
I mean, perhaps Google analytics might make sense anywhere else except this but perhaps you are right that there might be many dev's who don't know anything except G.A.
But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
There are many alternatives present which value gdpr and can be self hosted easily.
I am unsure of what should be done if its case of ignorance rather than malice, malice can be fixed but ignorance is a greater systemetic issues and there are websites which help in fixing the gap of knowledge (like the ones I linked, esp alternativeto has genuinely helped me personally in many things) but the issue is that people might not even know or perhaps even bother with these websites too.
So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
> Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
It's just a random example what marketers and owners think about when choosing an analytics platform, not specific to a suicide prevention website. But also, think that the website owner has some "Goal" which in this context might be "Someone calls and didn't kill themselves", then they'd try to setup their analytics platform to give them concrete numbers and metrics about this "sales funnel".
> But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
Me too, and I don't disagree with anything what you write.
But practically, among less-technical users, imagine your typical Windows dev who've written C# code for two decades and gets excited when Microsoft holds press-conferences, these people aren't seriously gonna re-evaluate their choices, they go with what they already know in 99% of the cases.
> So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
Best you can do is be honest, forthcoming and help them understand if it feels like they don't understand. Ultimately, people won't try to solve things they don't see as issues, so the first step to take might be to clearly identify and show them what issues the current approach as, with concrete evidence and context.
I think it's more incompetence than malice. It's just such a standard thing for engineers to throw analytics tracking in every website/product they build. Although I am surprised not one person realised this might be a bad idea given the sensitive nature of the site.
It shouldn't be but it is. Otherwise we'd find most European sites don't have consent popups. In reality we have tonnes, many now requiring payment if you want to reject trackers.
> What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice.
When it comes to companies' wrongdoing, I'm starting to not care whether it's incompetence or malice anymore. When money and/or lives are at stake, incompetence is shaped like malice. We need to have a new word for this kind of "deliberate stupidity" and punish it just like we punish intent to do wrong.
> Though, not at places that have such a strong social mission as this one.
That's the shameful thing really. Yeah it's pretty common to have (GDPR violating) cookies and 'share all analytics' settings on by default with "privacy is very important to us" statements on the website. As "one of those guys" I see this all the time. For a commercial business it's just eye rolling, but these kinds of social good companies really should be held to a higher standard. With that standard just being "privacy by design please".
The websites' feedback form gave me a "try again in !minutes" error so frankly I think the dev team is malicious by incompetence. It's a very pretty site though, so at least there's that.
"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.
Almost noone is really "evil" in this stereotypical way, it is a thoroughly unhelpful way to view these things, it's more like criminal negligence that people who work for the government to handle medical data still don't know or don't care that google analytics sends data to google after 20 years of google analytics existing, and that the government as a whole does not have systems in place to enforce data privacy and hold people accountable who violate it.
> industry standard
Some time more than 10 years ago, industry standard moved away form Linux, Apache, open source, etc. to big-tech. Many developers attending conferences cannot differentiate propaganda (Facebook connected, Google I/O, etc.) from a technical presentation . And they moved all their stack to software and hardware that is not under their control. A total failure of engineering but a big win for shareholders.
At some point we have to get used to the idea that there are no such thing as free services. If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.
> If you're not paying for something that clearly has a cost to the entity providing it, then value will be extracted from you in other ways.
Then we should get used to the idea that even when you're paying a lot of money for something the entity taking your money will still do everything and anything to extract even more value from you including collecting and selling your data, remotely disabling features of the thing you paid for so they can start charging you a monthly fee to get them back, aggressively infesting the product with ads, pushing updates that degrade the service to incentivize you to upgrade, etc.
The greed of companies and their shareholders will never be satisfied so ultimately what we need are real consumer protections in the form of powerful regulation and enforcement.
I agree. I'm not defending the current state of affairs by any means.
Do you realize this thread is about a suicide preventation website? Can’t you separate between public services and profit-based ones?
I think the best-faith assumption was they were taking about the use of Google analytics. For the suicide prevention website, the value is the benefit to society of you not killing yourself.
Paying the danegeld logic. They are more than happy to charge you money and spy on you. See Windows 11, Bambu printers making every print go through their cloud, smart TVs reporting on what you watch, cars tattling on where you're driving, and countless other examples.
This is true, but it's important to note that this will still likely happen for services you are paying for, too.
This kind of thing is why I wouldn't touch a site like that. Websites, service providers, and internet-connected software that collects data from you can't be trusted even a little, so I avoid them to the greatest degree I can. The rule of thumb is that anything you tell to them, or any data you have put in their custody, is at risk.
Europe has laws against misuse of data from visitors, so it’s generally safe to visit such websites.
The fact that this is on hackernews means this case is the exception, not the rule.
Even if you're in the US and make a phone call to a suicide prevention hotline the fact that you called them, how many times you called them, and how long you spoke with them can end up in the hands of data brokers. That data will never go away and it can impact your employment, your insurance, be used against you in court, etc.
People in the middle of a mental health crisis shouldn't have worry that trying to get help will cause a black mark on their permanent record with lifelong consequences but that's exactly what surveillance capitalism has enabled.
It's not supposed to happen, your call records should be secure, but of course it happens all the time
https://consumercal.org/about-cfc/cfc-education-foundation/y...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t-says-hackers-stole-re...
unsure why you are being downvoted. this is universally true. your data is either being actively shared with partners, or inadvertently shared in the form of weak security, exploits, wide-open buckets, etc.
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, callous people make money while vulnerable, sensitive people pay up. Beautiful world we live in ;). Please drink responsibly!
"Young adult suicide rates dropped after U.S. launched 988 hotline":
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/988-crisis-hotlin...
"Suicide deaths dropped 11% from projected rate in the first two years of the revamped lifeline"
* https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/22/988-hotline-linked-11-pe...
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 diversity of people out there, so the fact that some find this appealing is not interesting or surprising.
So, the question, in my mind, is less that something works for somebody, and more about the broader meaning of this civilizational function.
[0] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006)
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.
Most people don't believe in incremental progress anymore, either it works 100% of the time and solves everything forever or it's a failure and you probably wanted it to fail because you're evil.
No I believe that what you have with the 11 percent decrease is reflective of diversity among people and what causes crisis. Suicide hotlines work for some people in some cases, that is undeniable. But it's not incremental in that you're not going to then iterate on the hotline and make it more effective and one day we've got 20% and so on. That won't be the case because the hotline is just not appealing for many people. It's good for the people it's good for, but that doesn't mean it's not a civilizational CYA/"not my problem".
Are you under the impression that hotlines are the only intervention that is being explored?
No.
You already called suicide hotlines capitalist, I don't have any respect for your opinion on this matter.
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.
Do you keep bandaids in your house? Or do you rely purely on the Emergency Room a/o "toughing it out"?
Bandaids are useful. And can save measurable numbers of lives.
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 up conceptually with money and expedience. Feelings, in my opinion, are sort of in a different human realm.
But yes, for sure, that alienation as I allege it, is probably good for many people in crisis who are uncomfortable with the people around them. However, the question of why it is that such people aren't comfortable with anyone around them is the bigger one in my mind.
> Please drink responsibily
To me, although they work, suicide hotlines appear to be a naked corporate CYA, just like gambling and other addiction hotlines. Civilization will beat you down, won't give you health insurance except for a few free COVID shots (then, suddenly, people can totally mobilize to administer collective healthcare), but hey when you've just about had it, here's a hotline you can call (and we'll sell your data hahahahaha sucker).
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.
> The rest, everything else.
What are you specifically talking about? What is “everything else”?
Existence, where you're just thrown out there to sink or swim and that's thats. If you're lucky you have parents and/or friends who can help you. If you're not, well... good luck!
Is that reaction to Dutch, German or French social support? Cause all three provide serious support and are the west.
I didn't think that in Netherlands, Germany or France you can live like a normal person if you are, say, depressed or addicted to drugs and don't want to or can't work.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Can you fill me in?
Why are you continuing to argue with someone who from their second response or third response in the thead - is at best disingenuous?
Brutal that you would think I am being disingenuous based on my responses. Sad for me genuinely.
What's capitalist about it? It works.
An 11% drop isn't "something works for somebody," it's "it works for a lot of people, substantially more people than it harms, making for a clear net gain."
In individual with odd habits is a completely different thing. That comparison is utterly inapt.
If you had an entire population that started running the AC at 60 degrees and eating ice cubes all day, and cognition measurably increased by 11%, that would be incredible news.
To be clear I'm not saying it's not a net gain. It's very clearly a net gain.
But, just because it works doesn't mean it's not a capitalism solution using the capitalism hammer of talking to random people behind a phone (which, again, might be a net good thing for some people crisis).
So again, I am not against anti-suicide hotlines. I am sincerely happy they help many people. I just think they are very symbolically representative of our capitalist alienated world where everything, down to our very drive to exist, has a corporate CYA hedge hotline.
I think you are very, very confused about the definition of capitalism.
It is interesting because while the hotline might help some, it can also do significant damage to others depending on what happens after the phone call. Of course, nothing in life is every 100% good for everyone or every situation.
While not everyone that calls the hotline is involuntarily committed, I wonder how the data matches up with this finding [1]:
> "In this meta-analysis of 100 studies of 183 patient samples, the postdischarge suicide rate was approximately 100 times the global suicide rate during the first 3 months after discharge and patients admitted with suicidal thoughts or behaviors had rates near 200 times the global rate. Even many years after discharge, previous psychiatric inpatients have suicide rates that are approximately 30 times higher than typical global rates."
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5710249/
Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place? It seems obvious, but it doesn't sound like they are.
People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population, but that doesn't imply that hospital treatment is damaging.
> Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place?
How certain are you that this is a fact? I agree that is seems like common sense on the surface, but that might not be the case. The closest I could find in the study was this:
> However, the findings should curb enthusiasm for restrictive interventions directed at patients labeled as having high risk of suicide by virtue of demographic or clinical variables. Our figures suggest that 0.28% of all discharged patients can be expected to commit suicide during the first 3 months after discharge. The modest statistical strength of suicide risk assessment means that even patients who are classified as having high risk because of their suicide risk factors will have a low absolute probability of suicide over clinically meaningful time frames, whereas patients with a low risk for suicide will still have a probability of suicide that is many times that in the general community.
It also seems that largest factor, and perhaps a better determinant of severity, is the number of times one is (re)admitted.
> People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population
How much higher?
Do you think this statement is comparable to cancer treatment?
> Our data suggest that the suicide rates among discharged patients have not decreased in the past 50 years. This is a disturbing finding considering the increase in community psychiatry and the availability of a range of new treatments during this period.
I think this is the take away from the study that is also important:
> However, the very high suicide rates calculated in this study and the known limitations of suicide risk assessment suggest that a focus on clinical risk assessment might mislead clinicians into thinking that some patients can be regarded as having low risk after discharge. Our findings better support the views of authors who believe in a more universal approach to suicide prevention that might focus on periods of high risk but that extends for periods of years.
Also, I need to clarify one thing. I apologize for any confusion. I realized how half-finished my initial comment was. I did not mean to imply the damage from facilities comes from treatments per se, though there are still risks with all treatments. I should have clarified that damage can occur from the systems surrounding the facility. The (incorrect) stigma surrounding admission, the potential police interventions, the medical debt from being admitted, loss of certain rights/job prospects, etc.. Yes, the facilities do help some individuals, that is their purpose, but some people are hesitant to say, call the hotline, out of fear of being committed, which can also be damaging.
I'm quite confident that people admitted to institutions for suicidal thoughts are much more prone to suicide.
But it doesn't actually matter to my point. It's a very reasonable hypothesis, true or not. It needs to be addressed as a potential confounding factor, either by showing it's not true, or by showing that the size of the observed effect is greater than the effect from the confounding factor.
I mean, yeah. Of course. You don't get involuntarily committed if you're not at high risk. What?
Nothing I wrote contradicts that.
To me, the hotline is an absolute joke and one of the last things I would do if I were contemplating harming myself. I've often wondered if there is hard data showing it is effective overall, or whether it's just bandwagon group think run amok.
I have lost a number of friends to suicide, and as a result I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what could have been done to have helped them before it was too late. In nearly all cases, it was pretty well thought out and not a spur of the moment thing. In some cases, they even took steps to prevent people from discovering their plans. So anecdotally, a suicide hotline would not have helped at all.
Based on some searching though, it seems like there is data showing that it helps on the whole. I guess for people who are having a spur of the moment thought, it might be potentially helpful. However I also found some people saying that seeing the prolific messages about calling the hotline when searching for information about things really pushed them away and somewhat backfired.
I guess ultimately this is a very complex issue with no one size fits all solution. If I ever get to a point where I no longer have to work, this is a cause I would love to work on for the people that tend to think it through more and less spontaneous.
Having an option to talk to someone when you're alone and having trouble getting out of your own head is a great option. If you don't know what to do and you only see death as the option, having someone give you options seems like a good thing to have available at a relatively low cost.
I don't think anyone is expecting this to "solve suicide" but it sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?
Calling a therapist is similar to a "hotline" but you need to have a therapist first, which is a pain in the ass. Making that easier would be a good concrete second step (which a hotline can also help with!)
"sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?"
There seem to be many things that we could do, like addressing suicide as a social contagion including in media portrayal, providing better substance abuse and mental health treatment options, etc. A hotline is like a bandaid - its not going to fix the underlying societal issues like disconnection, lack of community, lack of opportunity/hope, social media, etc.
Disconnection, lack of community / opportunity / hope and social media are all major societal issues that (in my opinion) are not going to be solved by any sort of single government or charity. Making progress on that takes shifting norms / moving the overton window on depression and addiction, and overriding a lot of human nature (we like easy, we like saccharine, etc).
Definitely open to whatever concrete ideas you have that would fix those things, especially if they don't require a nation's whole GDP.
What’s your point? Okay, the hotline is a bandage, but that’s entirely the point, you use it when you’re feeling suicidal and you need to talk to someone. You don’t use it to fix structural issues in your life that lead to you feeling like that.
There is hard data showing they extended several thousand lives.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/988-hotline-linked-to-th...
The important thing to remember is the variability of the human condition, stuff that would fall 90% of the time can still move the numbers.
As mentioned above - there is data that helps.
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"
What on earth is the "industrial complex" part about this? Outside of pharma pushing pills I'm not sure what other profit-seeking, recursive elements exist in the "suicide prevention industry".
Legitimately curious about this - not sure how these words would apply.
I would much rather the suicide-prevention people become rich than the infinite-scroll advertising guys.
Not entirely sure what the GP meant either, but maybe it's like sports betting? Where some companies are heavily advertising and trying to get people to become "responsible gamblers" (addicted), meanwhile, some of those same companies are investing in mental health treatment facilities on the side. Thus, those gambling companies can make money off gambling addicts and when gambling addicts try to quit. As the saying goes, the house always wins.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/sports-betting-problem-gamb...
I think many people, not all, who are labeled “mentally ill” are just more attuned to the truth that society is depressing and anxiety inducing. In other words, the so called normal people are the crazy ones. But we define mental illness relative to how well someone can function in society, that’s literally how the DSM is used, even though society is clearly mad and perverse and 10 minutes on Twitter or reading the news is more than enough evidence to draw that conclusion. Every tech CEO or celebrity or successful person could be diagnosed with a multitude of mental illnesses, but because they’re “productive” members of society we glorify them instead. Explain to me how it’s normal and healthy to work 100 hours a week, take ketamine and adderall and other hardcode drugs regularly, post rants on the Internet at 3am, go make a decision that hurts or kills thousands of people, and then hit up the golf club after.
Then we take the people who notice all of this madness and tell them they’re crazy, ill, and malfunctioning. We put them in this Kafkaesque nightmare of gaslighting that probably does drive them mad over time.
I don’t want to say that if you’re hearing voices telling you to do things that you’re ok, but if you just feel depressed or anxious I think there’s a good chance you’re just awake to the sickness of society that most people are still in denial about and it might make you feel better to know you’re not the broken one. You still need to figure out how to adapt to the world, but just knowing you’re not broken gives you a foundation to build from.
I understand the point you make but I would counter that being happy doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of the world and injustice around you. It doesn’t mean that you condone it, think it’s good, etc. It does mean you probably avoid self-destructive behaviors like excess drug use, poor sleep, etc.
Many happy people are also agitators for change.
Not to say that happiness is a choice, but you can certainly make choices which make you sick with anxiety. It’s a disordered behavior to purposefully reinforce your sadness and anxiety about the world for no useful reason.
For instance, many people feel compelled to expose themselves to the horror of certain ongoing events constantly, via video. There are whole subreddits dedicated to it, on every side of most conflicts. At the end of the day, that is neither healthy nor productive, solely self-traumatizing. One reason this is a pernicious behavior is because it feels like there is righteousness in being a witness, but in reality it’s no different than self-harm.
I wasn't going to comment, but this is just too dumb on too many levels.
The hotline is not the way to deal with suicidality - suicidality is a longer process and something you can ask your GP about and most help is covered under most western versions of universal health care.
The hotline is an idea that intervenes in the last steps of a suicide process. The idea can reach into the moment where people have convinced themselves they're stuck - and they can reach out with extremely low effort or barrier to entry.
If you have some better 'idea' we can spread into the culture that does this better, then by all means enlighten us.
---
You could have made a case and started a discussion how too many people see the existence of the hotline as _the_ way to deal with suicidality, but you didn't. You just decided to spread some shallow vibe nonsense.
The NYT released an article[0], sorry paywalled, that discusses the effectiveness of the 988 hotline in lowering the number of suicides where it is available. Sadly, because of the joke that is mental health coverage in the US, that's as good of news as I've got for you. Mental health coverage isn't even available on the open market AMA (Obama Care), so 988 is the best we can offer.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/science/988-youth-suicide...
What do you advocate for to help people contemplating suicide? WHat do non-Western culture do to "deal with suicidality"? The issue is when the hotline is selling the data and not that the hotline itself exists.
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.
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, straightforward, and achievable set of life goals lowers suicide. This isn't to say that's the best way to live, but I could understand how it may make people more satisfied with their life.
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.
I think its very hard to draw conclusions. The country with the lowest rate is majority Christian and AFAIK is not extremely conservative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
A second list on that page gives different numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
In between is a table that shows the suicide rate is much lower in "upper middle income" countries than in either poorer or richer countries. I suspect that is a pointer. Affluent enough not to be constantly struggling, but different in some ways (urbanisation? materialism? isolation?) from the rich countries.
You also need to look at other factors. Conservative countries have younger populations, so you need to correct for that. Not all countries have equally accurate statistics.
I think conservative countries may have an advantage because of larger families, extended families, fewer people being single (and less isolated if they are) etc. but it needs more data. There are some pretty conservative countries with high rates.
What really happens is that nobody counts the suicides and they are reclassified as accidental deaths.
When the Netherlands was still Christian we did this too.
Suicide is not an attractive option if you believe that you'll be eternally punished for it in the after life.
To guess that people in countries with lower suicide are more satisfied is one possibility.
Satisfaction isn't even conditional on most of the rest of what I said, so even if the guess is wrong it doesn't change my statement much.
> It's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call
What is it telling?
Learnt a new word today: suicidality. Sounds like physicality, but with deadly consequences.
The logical next step is to replace the suicide hotline operators with AI. And maybe add a way for other people to gamble on the results.
You're getting downvoted but that IS the logical next step and it will totally happen.
Those hotlines literally drop suicide rates. They wont help everyone, but they do have good track record of helping people.
Many of these people do want someone to talk to 24/7, and they may well be isolated. They are not the only solution but one of them.
One of my friends was turned away from an NHS hospital the year before last and took his own life.
I've heard the Dutch one is is a little better. The ones in the USA aren't likely to do much more than call police to put a mental hold on you, during which the hospital will rack up so many bills that it would make anyone suicidal. And then yay, your gun rights gone forever, so if you are suicidal in part because you live in a dangerous impoverished shithole good luck defending yourself afterwards!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/will-988-call-the-police-data-s...
> Many people in mental health crisis fear that if they dial 988, law enforcement might show up or they might be forced to go to the hospital.
> But getting sent that kind of "involuntary emergency rescue" happens to around 1% of callers, suggests new data from Vibrant Emotional Health, the administrator of the 988 Lifeline for suicide and mental health crises.
If anything I did had a 1% chance of involuntary committal I would stop doing that thing immediately.
I don't think that's the right way to consider your odds of involuntary committal. It really depends on what you say in the calls. The more immediate and serious the danger the more likely you are to be involuntary committed. The caller range is quite large.
So that means you have to watch what you say if you call such a line. That seems risky enough to discourage me from calling if I were in such a state.
Would you rather not try to help the people that obviously need help?
What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
If they dispatch you to an institution you could lose your job just when you need money to pay for the bills you'll be sent.
With some careers, like being a pilot, you'd never be be to find another job.
You'd lose your ability to take out life insurance (even if it was a short temporary depression that you got over, like a side effect of a medication, the life insurance companies won't care.)
Or the institution's records could be hacked and you'll live in fear of your friends and family finding out.. which could cause rebound suicidal ideation...
There is no way I would ever call these hotlines unless it were 100% anonymous.
> What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
Is there actually any consequence free conversations? Even Lawyers can break confidentiality in some situations. I'm not saying that the hotline is perfect, I'm saying that it provides a lot of good. I hope you never feel the need to call the hotline, but it's an option that saves a lot of lives.
I think that's what strippers are for. Come in, pay in cash, say whatever, no paper trail or telephone logs, then leave. They're not mandatory reporters like doctors or licensed professionals and therapists are. From the ones I've known, this is no-shit what a lot of people use them for.
Does that include “untreated suicidal ideation”?
Yep, as someone who suffers from depression and suicidal ideation regularly its been made very clear to me on multiple occasions that I would rather be in this state than interface with involuntary committal. I don't know what points you are looking to score here.
I have several loved ones in the same situation, including two who've wound up in hospital in this way. I'm glad they did.
Fun? No. But better than dying.
I get it, I am not advocating to live unmedicated or anything, but pretty much every emergency medical experience I have had any contact with in the USA has been so universally painful and dehumanizing that it gives me extreme pause, I would not willingly engage with it.
I'm fine with someone making that call for themselves with personal experience, although doing it in a sound state of mind can be challenging in crisis.
I'd just caution you that it's not a universal experience. As with, say, COVID masking, some people found it abhorrent, and others still voluntarily mask today; some found lockdowns almost fun, others despised even the thought of staying home for a few days.
Statistically, police/committment intervention from calling the hotline is rare, and another commenter linked evidence (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122550) of significant benefits to balance it.
Gun rights are generally not gone forever. Federal law bars people adjudicated mentally defective or formally committed to a mental institution, neither of which include a temporary mental hold for suicide watch. State laws vary, but none of them have a law where a single temporary hold means "gun rights gone forever." Some states let people go buy a gun the day they are released from suicide watch, despite how irresponsible that sounds.
The temporary can easily turn into an adjudicated one. Happened to one of my friends during a nasty divorce, the high-IQ husband knew all the buttons to press to the state and kept fabricating to the state that the suicidal ideation was ongoing (it never existed in the first place) and then they committed my friend based on that. He was then successful in getting my friend's ability to defend herself removed so that she would be defenseless.
So from what i understand the only way your gun rights are "gone forever" is if a court ordered you to go to a mental hospital. If it's just a 911 call and a ride to the hospital (every trip to the "grippy sock hotel" I've ever seen), that does not apply and your gun rights are not removed federally. Some states have "red flag" laws but to my understanding those are temporary and end either after a time period or a court petition. I'm curious what laws you're talking about in the US that would take your gun rights for a suicide call.
This heavily depends on the state.
E.g. NY is not friendly in this scenario depending on the type of permit and the type of hold. An involuntary hold will impact your right to have a gun.
Involuntary commitment. Happened to a good friend of mine during a nasty divorce, the husband made up a suicidal story and my friend was committed without the court appointing her a lawyer to defend herself. She's struggling to get her rights back, it is apparently possible, but they're gone forever until you spend a lot of money on lawyers so it's true it's not strictly the case you can't get them back but they default to staying gone forever.
Just curious, but did this person have a history of emotional lability plus previous (voluntary) outpatient treatment?
This is just another form of stigma. Better to go without getting treated for mental health issues, or that very responsible decision to seek treatment will be used against you later.
See also the jump seat pilot who tried to pull the fire handles on a commercial flight.
In The Netherlands you can be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital due to risk of suicide, still get a weapons license, buy half a dozen guns and then go on a shooting rampage killing 7 and wounding 17 (Alphen a/d Rijn shooting, 2011).
This is not a comment on gun rights, but, IF you are having issues with suicide and depression I would absolutely remove those weapons from your house and access. Talk to a friend you trust. Have them stored. Something. Having them nearby is only going to increase the odds you end up dead.
They follow a flowchart. Most of it involves trying to figure out if you know any friends or family nearby. I guess finding someone for comfort might make sense, but the flowchart is too obvious and makes it sound like another typical marketing callcenter.
> if you are suicidal in part because you live in a dangerous impoverished shithole good luck defending yourself afterwards!
Is realistically "gun ownership" a plus in this scenario?
Seems like one of those situations where damned if they do, damned if they don't, isn't it? Like if someone is in immediate crisis what do you expect them to do?
I feel like if someone is calling a line, they are looking for intervention. If someone cries for help and the response is ensuring that someone doesn't fearmonger on Hacker News, I feel like that would be a problem.
"And then yay, your gun rights gone forever"
Gun owners are much more likely to kill themself with said gun than to ever defend themselves in any way, and anyone who has ideations should be the last person to want a gun. And suicide mostly afflicts white middle-aged males, most of whom don't live in "dangerous impoverished shitholes". I doubt the correlation is more than random.
You really think that legal prohibition on gun ownership is more a difference in life-and-death due to murder risk than suicide risk?
when society gets too big, sociopathy and opportunism win out
Yea this is bad.
I do want to mention though, while this is bad, I feel like we're singling out a site. Fact is, I've seen more places where this doesn't happen. Though, not at places that have such a strong social mission as this one. And while I've done my best to work at those places to get it fixed, there is a lot of inertia and simply ignorance. I'm not talking about small places either. I'm talking about non-tech places that make their profit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The inertia, the fact that no one else seems to care at such a place. It's an issue. Then I'm always the odd one out and looked at funny. When it's fixed no one really gives a shit and now I'm "that guy". A small form of resentment stays in these people.
Just mentioning my experience. It's stuff like this kind of apathy that gets us a world where a place like a suicide hotline just ignorantly does this kind of stuff. Or at least, that's my hypothesis: it's ignorance and apathy.
There's probably not a lot of data on this which is why I'm sharing this anecdata. I hope it's better than nothing.
Other websites with similar societal impacts and responsibilities have already been covered in Dutch news before, from governments to health information websites to healthcare providers.
The 113 suicide prevention hotline works together with professionals but it's not an official health care provider as far as I know.
There are probably plenty of similar websites with similar problems, but 113 is well known within the Netherlands so it's a poignant example to use in the media.
Getting media coverage on this will probably make these organizations do better, at least until the next conversion improvement marketeer gets access to the backend.
Their chat service uses something called "sprinklr.com", blocked by my filters automatically, which calls itself "The definitive AI‑native platform for extraordinary customer experiences".
I suppose there's always the phone number.
I have a similar outlook atm as one of "those guys."
Everything takes so long, nobody is held accountable. The most likely result of pushing for any type of positive outcome for basically anything is some form of punishment or social degradation.
And so, as of October 2024, I don't do it anymore.
I will also note that most of the things I see "being corrected" these days are entirely fictitious.
As an example is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada. They tossed out a valid complaint about Shaw (during Rogers buyout) for jurisdictional reasons. Then they are on the news making odd statements about (exclusively) OpenAI not being honest about using your data?
It's all a show it seems. I figured it needs to get a qhole lot worse before it can get any better.
I have moved to internal tooling creation and have airgapped a machine/tool each month this year so far. Just a laptop and my social phone remain networked.
> And so, as of October 2024, I don't do it anymore.
I feel you. I wish the world was a better place, but here we are. I don't know what else to say about it. I feel you.
There are times where working on the inside to make changes is a valid strategy, but it is definitely trending down, especially if there's just a single voice. The only other option is the public shaming route, but they've pretty much gotten to the point of being able to survive that as well now. It takes significant numbers to move the needle, but there have been recent examples of companies reacting to negative press.
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.
It’s “just” a major corporation collecting very personal data.
Data Protection Authority (DPA) should investigate. In Germany, the company's DPO (Data Protection Officer) has personal, criminal liability. For these cases, I'd like to see them in front of criminal court, and see what happens. I wanna see someone having a criminal record for this, and then all the stupid excuses of large companies about "I didn't know" and "I thought lalalala" will stop rather quickly. It will turn out that, at the end of the day, it was just a resource issue. And when criminal liability is on the table, resources magically... appear.
It's time to be serious about this. Unacceptable.
I thought Europe was more careful about things like this. This is pretty bad, these people are vulnerable and they're just mining they're data for profit.
It is, and that is why the company took action:
> After being confronted with this research, Stichting 113 temporarily suspended all measurement and analysis tools on its website.
It does not mean that this cannot happen, but the regulatory framework helps stop it.
I guess it didn't help enough to stop them from doing it in the first place--it just helped them stop once they were caught. Sure, it's a step up from other places where there is literally no consequence for this kind of sharing.
They are not mining the data profit; they are mining the data for managing their website.
Google is mining the data for profit and bartering with websites like this to get it.
Europe is more careful. But people will break the law.
This is a rare circumstance where I would actually assume incompetence vs malice. (Unlike big tech, which has weaponized good will)
I would hope that anyone medical adjacent would be more deliberate in building a service, but I can easily imagine following the same ad-infested path as everyone else. “Start with this Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Draft Kings starter template that bundles leftpad so you can save time for the hard work”
People make mistakes.
> This website uses cookies > We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features
I know there are some services that send GDPR data removal requests on your behalf. I wonder if there are any similar services that send messages like "Why the hell do you need these cookies?" to website operators.
I hardly ever see these cookie banners as my browser blocks most of them, but I still think it would be great to rub the idea of "Your website doesn't need any non-technical cookies" in website operators' faces.
At least you want get targeted ads for antidepressiva in the Netherlands!
I missed when tech was about saving people's lives not this
Hate this
"Dutch suicide prevention hotline shares visitor data with tech companies" is certainly one way of saying "Dutch suicide prevention hotline website uses Google Analytics".
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.
> Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.
It absolutely is that website deciding to trade data about their visitors in exchange for getting something for free. That's "active sharing" in my book.
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.
Nothing deeper is required. This is already outrageous. You can hardly make it worse.
You say that like there's a difference. You say that like the detail of data that Google Analytics farms is acceptable. You say that like what Google does with the data is acceptable. Just because companies want the data doesn't mean they deserve it.
Totally agree that Google should not be on a service like this in any shape or form.
But "sharing data" does somewhat suggest they are sharing the payload, the actual conversations.
What does Google do with analytics data that's not acceptable to you?
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397 says "Regardless of your data sharing settings, your Analytics data may also be used only insofar as necessary to Maintain and protect the Analytics service."
> Maintain and protect the Analytics service
This is a pretty broad leash.
"To maintain the analytics service we need to make money"
What's the absolute worst thing Google could be doing with that analytics data?
Selling the fact that you visited a suicide prevention website to anyone who cares to buy it. Google analytics knows exactly who you are the second you access a site that uses Analytics.
You don't have to be logged in. You don't even have to be a Google customer. They have IP and browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify people through aggregation of all their sources.
OK, there is a feasible way this could happen. Google would need to be using IP address plus browser device fingerprinting to identify users who visit Google Analytics sites, and would then need to be packaging that data to sell to advertisers.
I don't believe they do this, partly because if they did it would be something they would want to actively promote as a product to advertisers. Why do the creepy thing if you can't talk about it to make more money?
But technically I do believe it is feasible.
Sell it to insurance companies, employers? Use it to target ads of snake oil to vulnerable people?
Sell what to insurance companies?
All they have is that there was a hit from an IP at a specific date and time. Any cookies they set will let them tell that the same browser came back an hour later - but won't let them join traffic together across multiple sites.
IP can be correlated with other data to infer the identity. Google ads are everywhere, so Google probably knows, who you are and your IP.
I thought the same thing but it's still not a good look. The big tech companies offering this sort of thing should probably find ways to give better guarantees about data isolation, even if that requires e.g. clients paying additional fees.
Sounds like analytics data. The screen recordings of visits I particularly but. I despise when companies do that and act as if it's a normal thing. It might help your support when a user reports an issue but it's a massive violation of a user privacy and most users wouldn't have any idea it was even possible.
Free cloud service = risky.
If nto illegal, it seems clear that is inappropriate.
In the EU, it’s illegal
Who are the founders, their funders and their motivation?
Sheesh, reality is more cynical than any bleak humorist could ever write.
Why am I all of a sudden getting ads for rope and large amounts of Tylenol??
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
only one of the most vulnerable groups in our community.
I have lately thought about how the only tech I am interested in now is to assist programming. Programming for programming. Eternal yak shaving. And a big part of that is that end-user digital technology is a dystopia. No, not dystopic, not going in a bad direction. Just dystopia. Vultures and thugs at every corner preying on every “convenience” and mistake that you could make.
It is also good for mindless entertainment in between the real things that sometimes happen. And listening to music.
> I have lately thought about how the only tech I am interested in now is to assist programming. Programming for programming. Eternal yak shaving.
Could you give some specific examples?
I'm not OP, but I took their comment to mean things like internal dev tooling. Kind of stuff platform engineering focuses on
For example version control. That’s the kind of the thing that I read about and want to program myself. Things that have nothing to do with end-user software.
> Stichting 113 likely violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by sharing this data. The GDPR states that extra care must be taken regarding the security of medical personal data, which includes contact with an anonymous suicide prevention hotline.
This is quite sad to think about in multitude of ways :-(
What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice. There are so many competent & great dutch engineers and engineers in general, I refuse to believe that they couldn't find anyone ethical enough to take extra care regarding GDPR and sensitivity of the data in general.
> “At this moment, we are investigating what happened, how this could have occurred, what the potential impact has been, and what our next steps are,” the spokespersons aid. They didn’t say whether the trackers would be turned on again
I hope the investigation that they are saying in the articles goes swiftly to really find out the real reason as to why this ended up happening in first place and the reasons behind it are made public sooner rather than later.
See my comment. My hypothesis is: ignorance and apathy that results in incompetence.
Using GA4 is just the normal thing right?
Look in a room full of marketing experts and they will say yes or shrug.
Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
To answer: no GA4 is not just the normal thing. There is no normal. It's the dominant thing and it invades privacy like hell and the whole thing needs to be thought about in a different way. I'd advice almost everyone to stop smoking that Google crack pipe and roll your own or find an analytics friendly vendor.
Yea I got a bit rhetorical there, apologies for being a bit fed up with this situation.
Yes, my comment was published just one minute after yours so I only saw your comment after mine and I appreciated reading your comment (& upvoted it)
> Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
But if that's the case, are we saying that when the website was being created, it was being created with no-one who was security expert or let alone security adjacent people?
This is what I had refused to believe because in my opinion, more due diligence within the structure should've taken place and if there was no-one competent within the team, then why not hire one who is?
I can't help but feel frustrated, this is probably gonna negatively impact people who have talked on such suicide prevention websites.
Literally these websites is to create a safe space and for a person to be heard, if one introduces the concept of tracking or even feeling tracked, I can't help but feel frustrated as to why, why not hire people who know about security especially for such websites and especially with these laws. I am unable to understand this to be more specific.
Marketing people like the features they're getting, and Google and Meta are dominant, so big that they're the default, in the same way that we talk about github being the default option, and "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM / (big tech company of your choosing)". I wouldn't dream of saying they should choose something else, without researching and guaranteeing that nothing they'd ever want from GA (and they may not know everything they'll want in the future right now) is missing in the alternative. In a role (marketing) that's completely out of my wheelhouse. So I don't even bother.
Not all websites are created with IT in the loop. And sometimes even if IT is in the loop, then they aren't privacy/security conscious enough.
I got to see this first-hand being part of a marketing department. IT was explicitly left out of the loop. Though that was a Fortune 500 company. I'm not saying it's the same situation for the organization of this article.
My point simply is: IT is not always in the loop when a site gets created. And I bet "not always" is putting it mildly.
Tribalism is a thing. Or at least, I call it tribalism.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". It's that kind of stuff, unfortunately.
> See my comment.
No, I refuse being told what to do.
It wasn't meant that way as a comment ;-)
Everything in life is optional.
> Stichting 113 has temporarily disabled all measurement and analysis tools.
It seems that it is only temporary.
> “We realize that visitors must be able to trust that their privacy is protected and regret that concerns have arisen regarding this.”
They also regret that "concerns have arisen". No other regrets have been mentioned.
Right? "We don't regret that we did this, just that people are mad about it"
> What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice. There are so many competent & great dutch engineers and engineers in general, I refuse to believe that they couldn't find anyone ethical enough to take extra care regarding GDPR and sensitivity of the data in general.
Ask 100 random developers to setup a website, and to make sure the website owner should be able to see how many people visit the website, and probably 90 of those developers will default to setting up Google Analytics, just by "instinct".
People generally just continue with whatever they've learned, not revisiting the default choices they make, and it's been ingrained over decades that "Google Analytics is the best way to optimize your sales funnel" or whatever the marketers drink nowadays, so it'll take some time for these folks to revisit their decisions.
Not just instinct, I'd need to be able to justify the choice against any potential downside of not choosing the default option.
> People generally just continue with whatever they've learned, not revisiting the default choices they make, and it's been ingrained over decades that "Google Analytics is the best way to optimize your sales funnel" or whatever the marketers drink nowadays, so it'll take some time for these folks to revisit their decisions.
Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
I mean, perhaps Google analytics might make sense anywhere else except this but perhaps you are right that there might be many dev's who don't know anything except G.A.
But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?license...
https://openalternative.co/alternatives/google-analytics
There are many alternatives present which value gdpr and can be self hosted easily.
I am unsure of what should be done if its case of ignorance rather than malice, malice can be fixed but ignorance is a greater systemetic issues and there are websites which help in fixing the gap of knowledge (like the ones I linked, esp alternativeto has genuinely helped me personally in many things) but the issue is that people might not even know or perhaps even bother with these websites too.
So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
> Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
It's just a random example what marketers and owners think about when choosing an analytics platform, not specific to a suicide prevention website. But also, think that the website owner has some "Goal" which in this context might be "Someone calls and didn't kill themselves", then they'd try to setup their analytics platform to give them concrete numbers and metrics about this "sales funnel".
> But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
Me too, and I don't disagree with anything what you write.
But practically, among less-technical users, imagine your typical Windows dev who've written C# code for two decades and gets excited when Microsoft holds press-conferences, these people aren't seriously gonna re-evaluate their choices, they go with what they already know in 99% of the cases.
> So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
Best you can do is be honest, forthcoming and help them understand if it feels like they don't understand. Ultimately, people won't try to solve things they don't see as issues, so the first step to take might be to clearly identify and show them what issues the current approach as, with concrete evidence and context.
> Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
They’re not governmental, but an organization dependent on subsidies and to get them, they have to show they’re relevant.
I think it's more incompetence than malice. It's just such a standard thing for engineers to throw analytics tracking in every website/product they build. Although I am surprised not one person realised this might be a bad idea given the sensitive nature of the site.
In Europe, it’s not (and should not be) a “standard” thing.
It shouldn't be but it is. Otherwise we'd find most European sites don't have consent popups. In reality we have tonnes, many now requiring payment if you want to reject trackers.
> What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice.
When it comes to companies' wrongdoing, I'm starting to not care whether it's incompetence or malice anymore. When money and/or lives are at stake, incompetence is shaped like malice. We need to have a new word for this kind of "deliberate stupidity" and punish it just like we punish intent to do wrong.
> Though, not at places that have such a strong social mission as this one.
That's the shameful thing really. Yeah it's pretty common to have (GDPR violating) cookies and 'share all analytics' settings on by default with "privacy is very important to us" statements on the website. As "one of those guys" I see this all the time. For a commercial business it's just eye rolling, but these kinds of social good companies really should be held to a higher standard. With that standard just being "privacy by design please".
The websites' feedback form gave me a "try again in !minutes" error so frankly I think the dev team is malicious by incompetence. It's a very pretty site though, so at least there's that.
"Do not kill yourself, please! You still have so much value that can be extracted from you."
This kind of crap is why I am moving all of my tech stack to the US
Nack. Move all your private thoughts to pen and paper and direct conversations.
Smart. Europe is a circius.
Europe has laws against misuse of personal data. What circus?