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Thursday, January 24, 2019

Facebook’s Suicide Algorithms are Invasive

Michael Spencer
www.medium.com
Originally published January 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Facebook is scanning nearly every post on the platform in an attempt to assess suicide risk. Sadly, Facebook has a long history of conducting “experiments” on its users. It’s hard to own a stock that itself isn’t trustworthy either for democracy or our personal data.

Facebook acts a bit like a social surveillance program, where it passes the information (suicide score) along to law enforcement for wellness checks. That’s pretty much like state surveillance, what’s the difference?

Privacy experts say Facebook’s failure to get affirmative consent from users for the program presents privacy risks that could lead to exposure or worse. Facebook has a history with sharing our personal data with other technology companies. So we are being profiled in the most intimate ways by third parties we didn’t even know had our data.

In March 2017, Facebook launched an ambitious project to prevent suicide with artificial intelligence but what is the real reason they make these contructs? It’s to monetize our data, it’s not to “help humanity” or connect the world.

The info is here.