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#data#suicide#analytics#google#hotline#website#more#don#thing#why
Discussion (153 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
"Don't know, boss. We'd need to add analytics."
"Like what?"
"Google Analytics? It's free and pretty much universal."
"Ok, do it."
It's just standard. Not great, and Google uses the data in all sorts of ways that they don't make obvious. But it's not a cabal of evil website owners selling data to tech giants. They're just trying to run their websites and they're using industry standard, free services to do so. It doesn't cross their mind that they're helping google build individual profiles to sell targeted ads.
I'd love for self-hosted analytics to really get a foothold, not just for the increased privacy, but also because all the tech giants cripple your access to the data they collect off your own site.
Some time more than 10 years ago, industry standard moved away form Linux, Apache, open source, etc. to big-tech. Many developers attending conferences cannot differentiate propaganda (Facebook connected, Google I/O, etc.) from a technical presentation . And they moved all their stack to software and hardware that is not under their control. A total failure of engineering but a big win for shareholders.
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/988-crisis-hotlin...
"Suicide deaths dropped 11% from projected rate in the first two years of the revamped lifeline"
* https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/22/988-hotline-linked-11-pe...
For example, some people want to work at Palantir and find it interesting that some executive named Steve Cohen runs the AC at 60 degrees and eats ice cubes all day to aid cognition[0]. There's a very wide diversity of people out there, so the fact that some find this appealing is not interesting or surprising.
So, the question, in my mind, is less that something works for somebody, and more about the broader meaning of this civilizational function.
[0] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006)
It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.
In individual with odd habits is a completely different thing. That comparison is utterly inapt.
If you had an entire population that started running the AC at 60 degrees and eating ice cubes all day, and cognition measurably increased by 11%, that would be incredible news.
While not everyone that calls the hotline is involuntarily committed, I wonder how the data matches up with this finding [1]:
> "In this meta-analysis of 100 studies of 183 patient samples, the postdischarge suicide rate was approximately 100 times the global suicide rate during the first 3 months after discharge and patients admitted with suicidal thoughts or behaviors had rates near 200 times the global rate. Even many years after discharge, previous psychiatric inpatients have suicide rates that are approximately 30 times higher than typical global rates."
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5710249/
People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population, but that doesn't imply that hospital treatment is damaging.
I have lost a number of friends to suicide, and as a result I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what could have been done to have helped them before it was too late. In nearly all cases, it was pretty well thought out and not a spur of the moment thing. In some cases, they even took steps to prevent people from discovering their plans. So anecdotally, a suicide hotline would not have helped at all.
Based on some searching though, it seems like there is data showing that it helps on the whole. I guess for people who are having a spur of the moment thought, it might be potentially helpful. However I also found some people saying that seeing the prolific messages about calling the hotline when searching for information about things really pushed them away and somewhat backfired.
I guess ultimately this is a very complex issue with no one size fits all solution. If I ever get to a point where I no longer have to work, this is a cause I would love to work on for the people that tend to think it through more and less spontaneous.
I don't think anyone is expecting this to "solve suicide" but it sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?
Calling a therapist is similar to a "hotline" but you need to have a therapist first, which is a pain in the ass. Making that easier would be a good concrete second step (which a hotline can also help with!)
There seem to be many things that we could do, like addressing suicide as a social contagion including in media portrayal, providing better substance abuse and mental health treatment options, etc. A hotline is like a bandaid - its not going to fix the underlying societal issues like disconnection, lack of community, lack of opportunity/hope, social media, etc.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/988-hotline-linked-to-th...
The important thing to remember is the variability of the human condition, stuff that would fall 90% of the time can still move the numbers.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
Legitimately curious about this - not sure how these words would apply.
What is it telling?
The hotline is not the way to deal with suicidality - suicidality is a longer process and something you can ask your GP about and most help is covered under most western versions of universal health care.
The hotline is an idea that intervenes in the last steps of a suicide process. The idea can reach into the moment where people have convinced themselves they're stuck - and they can reach out with extremely low effort or barrier to entry.
If you have some better 'idea' we can spread into the culture that does this better, then by all means enlighten us.
---
You could have made a case and started a discussion how too many people see the existence of the hotline as _the_ way to deal with suicidality, but you didn't. You just decided to spread some shallow vibe nonsense.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/science/988-youth-suicide...
The hotline installed analytics software to help them do their job.
Do "non-Western culture have a better solution to suicidality?
That's a sale, a very old form of sale, called bartering.
I wonder if having a pretty rigid, straightforward, and achievable set of life goals lowers suicide. This isn't to say that's the best way to live, but I could understand how it may make people more satisfied with their life.
A second list on that page gives different numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
In between is a table that shows the suicide rate is much lower in "upper middle income" countries than in either poorer or richer countries. I suspect that is a pointer. Affluent enough not to be constantly struggling, but different in some ways (urbanisation? materialism? isolation?) from the rich countries.
You also need to look at other factors. Conservative countries have younger populations, so you need to correct for that. Not all countries have equally accurate statistics.
I think conservative countries may have an advantage because of larger families, extended families, fewer people being single (and less isolated if they are) etc. but it needs more data. There are some pretty conservative countries with high rates.
Then we take the people who notice all of this madness and tell them they’re crazy, ill, and malfunctioning. We put them in this Kafkaesque nightmare of gaslighting that probably does drive them mad over time.
I don’t want to say that if you’re hearing voices telling you to do things that you’re ok, but if you just feel depressed or anxious I think there’s a good chance you’re just awake to the sickness of society that most people are still in denial about and it might make you feel better to know you’re not the broken one. You still need to figure out how to adapt to the world, but just knowing you’re not broken gives you a foundation to build from.
Many happy people are also agitators for change.
Not to say that happiness is a choice, but you can certainly make choices which make you sick with anxiety. It’s a disordered behavior to purposefully reinforce your sadness and anxiety about the world for no useful reason.
For instance, many people feel compelled to expose themselves to the horror of certain ongoing events constantly, via video. There are whole subreddits dedicated to it, on every side of most conflicts. At the end of the day, that is neither healthy nor productive, solely self-traumatizing. One reason this is a pernicious behavior is because it feels like there is righteousness in being a witness, but in reality it’s no different than self-harm.
> Many people in mental health crisis fear that if they dial 988, law enforcement might show up or they might be forced to go to the hospital.
> But getting sent that kind of "involuntary emergency rescue" happens to around 1% of callers, suggests new data from Vibrant Emotional Health, the administrator of the 988 Lifeline for suicide and mental health crises.
E.g. NY is not friendly in this scenario depending on the type of permit and the type of hold. An involuntary hold will impact your right to have a gun.
Is realistically "gun ownership" a plus in this scenario?
I feel like if someone is calling a line, they are looking for intervention. If someone cries for help and the response is ensuring that someone doesn't fearmonger on Hacker News, I feel like that would be a problem.
"And then yay, your gun rights gone forever"
Gun owners are much more likely to kill themself with said gun than to ever defend themselves in any way, and anyone who has ideations should be the last person to want a gun. And suicide mostly afflicts white middle-aged males, most of whom don't live in "dangerous impoverished shitholes". I doubt the correlation is more than random.
https://consumercal.org/about-cfc/cfc-education-foundation/y...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t-says-hackers-stole-re...
The fact that this is on hackernews means this case is the exception, not the rule.
It's time to be serious about this. Unacceptable.
I do want to mention though, while this is bad, I feel like we're singling out a site. Fact is, I've seen more places where this doesn't happen. Though, not at places that have such a strong social mission as this one. And while I've done my best to work at those places to get it fixed, there is a lot of inertia and simply ignorance. I'm not talking about small places either. I'm talking about non-tech places that make their profit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The inertia, the fact that no one else seems to care at such a place. It's an issue. Then I'm always the odd one out and looked at funny. When it's fixed no one really gives a shit and now I'm "that guy". A small form of resentment stays in these people.
Just mentioning my experience. It's stuff like this kind of apathy that gets us a world where a place like a suicide hotline just ignorantly does this kind of stuff. Or at least, that's my hypothesis: it's ignorance and apathy.
There's probably not a lot of data on this which is why I'm sharing this anecdata. I hope it's better than nothing.
The 113 suicide prevention hotline works together with professionals but it's not an official health care provider as far as I know.
There are probably plenty of similar websites with similar problems, but 113 is well known within the Netherlands so it's a poignant example to use in the media.
Getting media coverage on this will probably make these organizations do better, at least until the next conversion improvement marketeer gets access to the backend.
Their chat service uses something called "sprinklr.com", blocked by my filters automatically, which calls itself "The definitive AI‑native platform for extraordinary customer experiences".
I suppose there's always the phone number.
Everything takes so long, nobody is held accountable. The most likely result of pushing for any type of positive outcome for basically anything is some form of punishment or social degradation.
And so, as of October 2024, I don't do it anymore.
I will also note that most of the things I see "being corrected" these days are entirely fictitious.
As an example is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada. They tossed out a valid complaint about Shaw (during Rogers buyout) for jurisdictional reasons. Then they are on the news making odd statements about (exclusively) OpenAI not being honest about using your data?
It's all a show it seems. I figured it needs to get a qhole lot worse before it can get any better.
I have moved to internal tooling creation and have airgapped a machine/tool each month this year so far. Just a laptop and my social phone remain networked.
I feel you. I wish the world was a better place, but here we are. I don't know what else to say about it. I feel you.
> After being confronted with this research, Stichting 113 temporarily suspended all measurement and analysis tools on its website.
It does not mean that this cannot happen, but the regulatory framework helps stop it.
I would hope that anyone medical adjacent would be more deliberate in building a service, but I can easily imagine following the same ad-infested path as everyone else. “Start with this Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Draft Kings starter template that bundles leftpad so you can save time for the hard work”
I know there are some services that send GDPR data removal requests on your behalf. I wonder if there are any similar services that send messages like "Why the hell do you need these cookies?" to website operators.
I hardly ever see these cookie banners as my browser blocks most of them, but I still think it would be great to rub the idea of "Your website doesn't need any non-technical cookies" in website operators' faces.
Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.
There's no "active conspiracy" needed as long as this kind of behavior keeps being normalized by comments like the above.
It absolutely is that website deciding to trade data about their visitors in exchange for getting something for free. That's "active sharing" in my book.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397 says "Regardless of your data sharing settings, your Analytics data may also be used only insofar as necessary to Maintain and protect the Analytics service."
This is a pretty broad leash.
"To maintain the analytics service we need to make money"
But "sharing data" does somewhat suggest they are sharing the payload, the actual conversations.
that's a violation of GDPR and also kinda suss
It is also good for mindless entertainment in between the real things that sometimes happen. And listening to music.
Could you give some specific examples?
This is quite sad to think about in multitude of ways :-(
What I am not understanding is the case of why, why would dutch government or website do this, is it out of honest mistake/(incompetence?) or malice. There are so many competent & great dutch engineers and engineers in general, I refuse to believe that they couldn't find anyone ethical enough to take extra care regarding GDPR and sensitivity of the data in general.
> “At this moment, we are investigating what happened, how this could have occurred, what the potential impact has been, and what our next steps are,” the spokespersons aid. They didn’t say whether the trackers would be turned on again
I hope the investigation that they are saying in the articles goes swiftly to really find out the real reason as to why this ended up happening in first place and the reasons behind it are made public sooner rather than later.
Using GA4 is just the normal thing right?
Look in a room full of marketing experts and they will say yes or shrug.
Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
To answer: no GA4 is not just the normal thing. There is no normal. It's the dominant thing and it invades privacy like hell and the whole thing needs to be thought about in a different way. I'd advice almost everyone to stop smoking that Google crack pipe and roll your own or find an analytics friendly vendor.
Yea I got a bit rhetorical there, apologies for being a bit fed up with this situation.
> Look in a room full of tech people and you'll see all security experts and security adjacent people screaming HELL NO or simply giving a nuanced answer that ultimately comes down to "no". Some will do funny little dances, some probably even just praying to a sun or rain god because they just lost it at that comment. I know I would.
But if that's the case, are we saying that when the website was being created, it was being created with no-one who was security expert or let alone security adjacent people?
This is what I had refused to believe because in my opinion, more due diligence within the structure should've taken place and if there was no-one competent within the team, then why not hire one who is?
I can't help but feel frustrated, this is probably gonna negatively impact people who have talked on such suicide prevention websites.
Literally these websites is to create a safe space and for a person to be heard, if one introduces the concept of tracking or even feeling tracked, I can't help but feel frustrated as to why, why not hire people who know about security especially for such websites and especially with these laws. I am unable to understand this to be more specific.
I got to see this first-hand being part of a marketing department. IT was explicitly left out of the loop. Though that was a Fortune 500 company. I'm not saying it's the same situation for the organization of this article.
My point simply is: IT is not always in the loop when a site gets created. And I bet "not always" is putting it mildly.
Tribalism is a thing. Or at least, I call it tribalism.
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome". It's that kind of stuff, unfortunately.
No, I refuse being told what to do.
Everything in life is optional.
It seems that it is only temporary.
> “We realize that visitors must be able to trust that their privacy is protected and regret that concerns have arisen regarding this.”
They also regret that "concerns have arisen". No other regrets have been mentioned.
Ask 100 random developers to setup a website, and to make sure the website owner should be able to see how many people visit the website, and probably 90 of those developers will default to setting up Google Analytics, just by "instinct".
People generally just continue with whatever they've learned, not revisiting the default choices they make, and it's been ingrained over decades that "Google Analytics is the best way to optimize your sales funnel" or whatever the marketers drink nowadays, so it'll take some time for these folks to revisit their decisions.
Perhaps you are right but what the duck does sales funnel mean in a suicide prevention website?
I mean, perhaps Google analytics might make sense anywhere else except this but perhaps you are right that there might be many dev's who don't know anything except G.A.
But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?license...
https://openalternative.co/alternatives/google-analytics
There are many alternatives present which value gdpr and can be self hosted easily.
I am unsure of what should be done if its case of ignorance rather than malice, malice can be fixed but ignorance is a greater systemetic issues and there are websites which help in fixing the gap of knowledge (like the ones I linked, esp alternativeto has genuinely helped me personally in many things) but the issue is that people might not even know or perhaps even bother with these websites too.
So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
It's just a random example what marketers and owners think about when choosing an analytics platform, not specific to a suicide prevention website. But also, think that the website owner has some "Goal" which in this context might be "Someone calls and didn't kill themselves", then they'd try to setup their analytics platform to give them concrete numbers and metrics about this "sales funnel".
> But I personally used to (still do) have the habit of searching open source alternatives to software themselves.
Me too, and I don't disagree with anything what you write.
But practically, among less-technical users, imagine your typical Windows dev who've written C# code for two decades and gets excited when Microsoft holds press-conferences, these people aren't seriously gonna re-evaluate their choices, they go with what they already know in 99% of the cases.
> So is there any solution to such issues except awkward silences?
Best you can do is be honest, forthcoming and help them understand if it feels like they don't understand. Ultimately, people won't try to solve things they don't see as issues, so the first step to take might be to clearly identify and show them what issues the current approach as, with concrete evidence and context.
When it comes to companies' wrongdoing, I'm starting to not care whether it's incompetence or malice anymore. When money and/or lives are at stake, incompetence is shaped like malice. We need to have a new word for this kind of "deliberate stupidity" and punish it just like we punish intent to do wrong.
That's the shameful thing really. Yeah it's pretty common to have (GDPR violating) cookies and 'share all analytics' settings on by default with "privacy is very important to us" statements on the website. As "one of those guys" I see this all the time. For a commercial business it's just eye rolling, but these kinds of social good companies really should be held to a higher standard. With that standard just being "privacy by design please".
The websites' feedback form gave me a "try again in !minutes" error so frankly I think the dev team is malicious by incompetence. It's a very pretty site though, so at least there's that.