Best Of

I wonder what things we've all agreed to in the very necessary consent form for the merger

I thought it was interesting you said this @JJLemon18 . I always feel a bit freaked about small prints.

I tried to read some about SHOUTS policies and found a really insightful article, if any of you are interested. I’ll link it here -

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/19/mental-health-helpline-funded-by-royals-shared-users-conversations

So it looks like SHOUT and MHI have a history of being absolutely brutal at communicating changes, especially when it comes to what they’re doing behind the scenes with our data.

I quoted this bit here because I find it kinda funny 😅😂

“More than 10.8 million messages from 271,445 conversations between February 2018 and April 2020 were used in a project with Imperial College London aimed at creating tools that use artificial intelligence to predict behaviour, including for instance, suicidal thoughts.”

The flipping love AI😂 it’s actually kinda scary.



TL;DR

Shout guaranteed that they would NEVER share individual conversations

THEN

Shout secretly 🥷 deleted their policy and decided to hand over over 10 million FULL conversations from vulnerable users to researchers / AI training

When they were called out for being unethical they basically said

Well actually … 🤓☝🏻…. Users technically agreed via our t&c’s

…….

There’s also a whole section on there about how MHI is linked with a ‘for profit’ organisation. It makes for an interesting read.


Anyway, there’s a great bit in the article which says

“Trust is everything in health – and in mental health most of all. When you start by saying in your FAQs that ‘individual conversations cannot and will not ever be shared’; and suddenly move to training AI on hundreds of thousands of ‘full conversations’, you’ve left behind the feelings and expectations of the vulnerable people you serve.”

They released their own statement there so you can form your own opinions

@Faolan I’ll give the logo thread a read too, as a screen reader user I’d completely overlooked it

FWIW, this is the thread I am on about: https://community.themix.org.uk/discussion/3597167/the-importance-of-being-genuine/p3

It was the big issue at the time and the elephant in the room, and at the time many didn’t feel it was being dealt with perfectly, but nothing is perfect. But it’s an example of how communication used to be. If anyone feels they don’t want this linked for whatever reason (perhaps one of your own posts)) please let me know. But it does feel important.

Edit: looking again, the first 2 responses on page 1 illustrate my point perfectly.

I wonder if the emoji thing is to do with the “data driven” model that shout use for their service? Former shout volunteer here, but we weren’t allowed to use emojis either. Partly because they can be misinterpreted, but also partly because they can look different on different devices. It’s fair enough in a 1-1 support setting like shout, but it feels impersonal in a community setting like this.

I have to say, as a shout volunteer I was very well supported. Their volunteer support team were incredible. If shout (which is part of the same charity) can do it, why can’t the mix? I have also looked at the volunteer recruitment page and seen there’s no openings to become a mod, and there haven’t been for a long time. This is not new either. But we were once told (possibly pre merger) that new mods were being recruited when there was no opening on the volunteer page.