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by News Manager.
Original Post: The canary in the data mine is dead
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Recently, I read a tweet from one of my favorite journalists and activists, Asher Wolf, about Samaritans Radar, an app that mines Twitter for keywords indicating someone might be suicidal or “struggling to cope.”
Concerns have been raised about privacy issues with Samaritans Radar -- which should be taken with a grain of salt, because it mostly mines public tweets. You could say that being upset about this is the digital equivalent of yelling in the town square, then grousing the next day that someone quoted you in the paper.
More accurately, Samaritans Radar is like putting a recording device in every town square and monitoring it for catchphrases, sort of like what the NSA now does with ... everything. Samaritans Radar is a bit creepy, but in the wrong hands, it could also be destructive.
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