Crisis Text Line, from my perspective | danah boyd | apophenia
▻http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-text-line-from-my-perspective.html
Passionnant. Les questions que se pose danah boyd sur les questions éthiques liée à l’activité d’aide et de conseil par texto avec des personnes en grande difficulté mentales (appels à l’aide en situations de crise, voire de suicide). Comment et faut-il utiliser les données que constituent ces échanges ? Que veut dire « consentement » quand on a affaire à des personnes en situation de crise psychologique ? Comment former les conseillers qui répondent aux personnes en difficulté ? Peut-on trouver des patterns dans les échanges qui permettent de prioritiser les réponses en fonction de l’urgence détectée par algorithme ? Enfin, comment financer l’activité des organisations bénévoles et hors marché quand les entreprises et l’Etat ne donnent pas les moyens réels de remplir des missions sociales pourtant nécessaires ?
Un très long texte, honnête dans son positionnement, ouvert dans ses questionnement, et bien loin des réponses en noir & blanc.
Like everyone who cares about Crisis Text Line and the people we serve, I have spent the last few days reflecting on recent critiques about the organization’s practices. Having spent my career thinking about and grappling with tech ethics and privacy issues, I knew that – had I not been privy to the details and context that I know – I would be outraged by what folks heard this weekend. I would be doing what many of my friends and colleagues are doing, voicing anger and disgust. But as a founding board member of Crisis Text Line, who served as board chair from June 2020 until the beginning of January 2021, I also have additional information that shaped how I thought about these matters and informed my actions and votes over the last eight years.
As a director, I am currently working with others on the board and in the organization to chart a path forward. As was just announced, we have concluded that we were wrong to share texter data with Loris.ai and have ended our data-sharing agreement, effective immediately. We had not shared data since we changed leadership; the board had chosen to prioritize other organizational changes to support our staff, but this call-to-action was heard loud and clear and shifted our priorities. But that doesn’t mean that the broader questions being raised are resolved.
Texters come to us in their darkest moments. What it means to govern the traces they leave behind looks different than what it means to govern other types of data. We are always asking ourselves when, how, and should we leverage individual conversations borne out of crisis to better help that individual, our counselors, and others who are suffering. These are challenging ethical questions with no easy answer.
What follows is how I personally thought through, balanced, and made decisions related to the trade-offs around data that we face every day at Crisis Text Line. This has been a journey for me and everyone else involved in this organization, precisely because we care so deeply. I owe it to the people we serve, the workers of Crisis Text Line, and the broader community who are challenging me to come forward to own my decisions and role in this conversation. This is my attempt to share both the role that I played and the framework that shaped my thinking. Since my peers are asking for this to be a case study in tech ethics, I am going into significant detail. For those not seeking such detail, I apologize for the length of this.
Most of the current conversation is focused on the ethics of private-sector access to messages from texters in crisis. These are important issues that I will address, but I want to walk through how earlier decisions influenced that decision. I also want to share how the ethical struggles we face are not as simple as a binary around private-sector access. There are ethical questions all the way down.
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