Mental health helpline funded by royals shared users’ conversations

I notice too that the UK Samaritans website also includes ad tracking.

I can think of no good reason why Google are tracking the users of a mental health crisis site.

As someone who has suffered -- still sometimes suffers -- mental health issues and has closely followed software security and privacy engineering over the last two decades (probably no coincidence), I'd like to share a contrarian viewpoint here.

In a sparsely-connected digital and urban world, it was reasonable to expect that the contents of in-person conversations and interactions should be well-protected. I don't think that was ever strictly true for everyone -- there would have been exceptions -- but the society-level understanding would be that conversations with doctors, therapists, attorneys, law enforcement, etc would remain strictly confidential.

In some ways I don't like that the digital world has become so interconnected -- particularly because of the security and privacy flaws that have been evident yet broadly ignored along the way -- but I do believe that it was inevitable and that it's an ongoing trend.

I also believe that mental health is under threat, largely due to increases in tech-driven narcissistic behaviour. I'm not blaming the narcissists - that's many of us nowadays - but I think that many of the technologies we use (particularly social media) encourage it, and that they create a fallout effect that harms small groups and large populations.

Given those priors that I have -- that anyone is free to disagree with -- I believe that, hard as it is, it may be for the best of populations to realize that we do not have much individual privacy because so much information about us leaks to our surroundings.

This was, in some ways, the norm in village environments. You'd know -- or strongly suspect -- if your partner was cheating on you based on the time they and another person disappeared out of view, or when one of the neighbour's objects unexpectedly appeared in your home.

Automation of bid-based advertising produces similar effects in our advertising feeds; there's no need for malevolent surveillance entities when a bid-optimization algorithm fills the same role naturally.

To circle back to the issue at hand: what may be necessary is for mental health support agencies to be able to see, read and understand how people react given this automated digital reminderscape. Until they understand it -- and that is hard to achieve based on aggregated keyword data -- it's hard for them to respond.

(I'll add that I despise that this is the situation that we have collectively allowed technology to lead us to, and that I personally believe that the source of almost all of the blame lies within advertising companies; that's just my two cents, however)