ISPs Help Prevent Suicide

But see then those American ISPs would be violating free speech and privacy. Unless you're in China talking about free speech.

They would not be violating free speech. They would just be watching the speech until they had reason to think that action on their part could save a life.

Is a message posted on an online forum "private"? I don't think it is. Maybe the fact that YOU sent the message is private, though. Chats and emails are obviously private.

The bottom line, of course, is: Are lives being saved by doing this?

Following the text Michael posted, it sez: "Two of the 14 people police managed to contact were in the process of committing suicide at the time of their discovery, but they were taken to hospital and survived. Nine others were persuaded not to commit suicide. The remaining three did not actually intend to commit suicide."

Those last three might have been a little mad, but I hope they can understand that the processes that led to their being mistakenly contacted are processes that have saved lives.

All kinds of privacy and confidentiality laws/contracts/ideals make exceptions for the sake of stopping imminent harm.

It seems to me that saying this is wrong would be a little like complaining you have to pull over when an ambulance goes by.

Hmmm, this is definitely something I'll want to talk about on MY blog...

You COULD also ask "Does a person have the right to commit suicide?", or "Is it really 'saving' a life when the person who has it does not want it anymore?", or "SHOULD police commit themselves to stopping suicide?", but I think that's a different-level question.

I'm not really sure where I stand on it.

I guess it might depend what the suicide is based on: A very young person committing suicide because they don't have any friends and does not have supportive parents is, possibly, different from an adult committing suicide because their life has been consistently spiraling downwards and they have no family, friends, money, etc, which in turn is different from a person with an unpleasant terminal illness.

I haven't given these "differences" much thought, I'm just thinking out loud and speaking out of my behind, but these questions are a relevant dimension to the discussion over whether patrolling the internet to stop suicides is "right".

I don't think there's any legal privacy issue if a private company decides to monitor the traffic that goes through its servers.

ISP's can't monitor adequately encrypted communications. Suicide notes on message boards are public anyway. (kind of guessing this is what the story is about) I don't see this as a privacy issue, but then people who don't know how to encrypt their business might see it differently.

Yes, message boards are non-private, so there are no privacy issues around calling the police regarding a future suicide mentioned on a message board.

One interesting question is email, though. I don't think the article specifies whether email is monitored. Email is one of the few things online that is PRIVATE. Someone reading my email when they're not supposed to is not really different from someone reading my snail-mail or going through my closets and drawers.

I agree with Michael that a company should have the right to monitor what goes through their servers. But with email you have to be careful. Does my landlord have the right to open my mail because it is in "his" house? Does the post office have the right to read my letters? Well, they have the right to scan packages for bombs and anthrax, and I think they can X-ray international packages to make sure drugs (and expensive things not mentioned in the customs form) aren't being smuggled...

Thing is, though, the servers aren't just monitoring the information, they're acting on it. That is also relevant. Does a company have the right to act on stock tips that go through their servers?

If the email is read by some automatic system that then determines "suicide probability: high, call police", this may be all right. That's not too different from Gmail computers reading your email to give you targeted ads. But I bet there's a real person in there somewhere, who actually READS the stuff to decide if he/she really ought to call the police. In other words, I doubt they just take the computer's word for it. And if they do this with people reading emails, then it might be a violation of privacy. Probably one that is all right, though.

Still, the article only talks about "posting messages", which are public anyways, so the email discussion is hypothetical. It's still an interesting one, though: WOULD it be all right to alert a human operator when one user's emails seem to contain many suicide-related words? To then allow the human operator to read the emails and to call the police?

Ah, and one more thing: Even if the message post is public, the information that YOU posted it may be private, if you are using an online alias you do not wish to be associated with your name. For example, if someone posts an "anonymous" reply to this post and calls me an idiot, it would not be trivial for me to find out their IP address (Michael's blog's host would have to give me this information from their log files) or for me to turn that IP address into a name or address (their ISP would have to do that for me, which is what this article is about). I think, unless what you're doing is illegal, you should be fairly safe behind your IP address and your online pen-name. (Hmmm, but suicide IS illegal... This just gets more complicated the more I think about it. I better go to bed).