danah (whom I truly respect and like as a person) practices something Watzlawick (1921-2007) called "Drowning 'duh' in data." It's an old sociologist trick to

danah (whom I truly respect and like as a person) practices something Watzlawick (1921-2007) called "Drowning 'duh' in data." It's an old sociologist trick to seem as if you're talking about much more than you are, a way to turn a paragraph into a PhD thesis and thus obscuring the content and meaning of the paragraph. Not quite as extensive and a little more to the point are the two blog entries posted by CTL: * https://www.crisistextline.org/blog/2022/01/28/on-mental-health-data-and-why-your-privacy-matters/ https://www.crisistextline.org/blog/2022/01/28/on-mental-hea... (Jan 28) * https://www.crisistextline.org/blog/2022/01/31/an-update-on-data-privacy-our-community-and-our-service/ https://www.crisistextline.org/blog/2022/01/31/an-update-on-... (Jan30) In the second of those two, the author writes: > We understand that you don’t want Crisis Text Line to share any data with Loris, even though the data is handled securely, anonymized and scrubbed of personally identifiable information. As a result, we have ended our data-sharing relationship with Loris. Which is a little bit of a "stop whining, it's not identifying" backhand. That skirts the issue of "we don't want you to make money of someone else's suffering" and the question of ethics review. If I want to share my data, with other academics or for-profits, I am required to go through an ethics review. danah boyd knows this, she's been in academia long enough. Others are CTL knew this as well. A good example would be the non-identifying data we gather from MRI scans which are used by the makers of MRI software to train a jitter-dejitter algorithm. The checkbox for the sharing of this, non-image, non-personally identifiable, data with the company (Siemens, Bruker, etc.) is hidden behind a "I have ethics committee review and here's the decision's file number and date" request. CTL didn't get into trouble for sharing "data [that] is handled securely, anonymized and scrubbed of personally identifiable information" but for doing so without independent ethics review. And that's a huge no no in mental or physical health data.