Suicide Hotlines Promise Anonymity. Dozens of Their Websites Send Sensitive Data to Facebook – The Markup
themarkup.org
The Markup found many sites tied to the national mental health crisis hotline transmitted information on visitors through the Meta Pixel
  • argv_minus_one@beehaw.orgEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    They also promise to help you, then send a squad of goons to your house to kidnap you and confine you indefinitely in a mental institution (read: torture chamber).

    Suicide prevention organizations have been inhumanly cruel for many years, so there’s nothing surprising about their cooperation with Facebook.

  • Storksforlegs@beehaw.orgEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    It sounds like the organization might not have been aware that this fundraising tool was doing this, that’s even worse. They think they’re providing a service to people and raising money meanwhile the people they’re helping are unwittingly being tracked - who knows how this information could be misused by insurers/employers/etc etc.

    I wonder what recourse the organizations could take? A lawsuit? Going to the media?

    • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      I wonder what recourse the organizations could take? A lawsuit? Going to the media?

      it seems very unlikely, at face, that they’d have legal standing to sue here (for a variety of reasons but the biggest one is probably lack of a law being violated due to US privacy law being so poor) so probably bad PR at most to be honest

  • StrayCatFrump@beehaw.orgEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    I appreciate that the only JS scripts Beehaw seems to load are from beehaw.org. Usually NoScript shows like two full pages of domains, and (at least—you know, the obvious ones) half of them are for ads and “analytics”.

    • brie@beehaw.orgEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      JS is first-party only, but as a PSA, Lemmy does not proxy images, so for someone could use ![](https://example.com/tracker.png), and loading the comment will contact example.com.

  • RiikkaTheIcePrincess@kbin.social
    10·
    1 year ago

    Oh, I read that headline and growled out loud. Yet another reason not to trust those places nor expect anything good out of them. Maybe they’ll call the cops, maybe they’ll just call Facebook. Maybe they didn’t mean to, maybe it doesn’t matter. sigh