When the answer to a spate of train suicides is a big Samaritans billboard and not MH funding and less austerity… they're being used.— Cel West (@Kosmogrrrl) October 30, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, irony is not dead. i'm gonna kill myself in the gas oven right now!— Midge (@Midge_UK) October 30, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It sent me an email about 20 minutes after that was first posted, which is a bit late for a ‘I’m going to kill myself … right now’, but possibly ok for people building up more slowly. (A later notification for a different tweet arrived after only 7 minutes.) Gmail autofiltered the email to my Updates tab, which means it did not generate an alert on my phone. All of the updates I got have been in a single thread, so I could move it to the primary inbox if I were concerned. Dear @celesteh,<\/p>\n Radar has spotted a tweet from someone you follow who may be going through a tough time.<\/p>\n Read the tweet here and find out how you can offer support.<\/p>\n View Tweet Now<\/p>\n If you need more information on how to help your friend or if you need some support yourself, please visit www.Samaritans.org\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Clicking through on the ‘View tweet now’ takes me to a web page.<\/p>\n Hi\u00a0@celesteh i'm gonna kill myself in the gas oven right now!— Midge (@Midge_UK) October 30, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Are you worried about this Tweet? Clicking yes gets a small pop up window overlaying the tweet in question:<\/p>\n You\u2019ve indicated that the tweet might be worrying. Here are some tips on what to do\u00a0next:<\/p>\n You might want to try and meet up with your friend, or arrange a time to chat on the\u00a0phone?<\/p>\n And that’s it. None of the pages had any queries or information relating to the nature of different relationships I might have with the potentially troubled tweeter. For example, if I got a tweet like that about an underling that I line-manage or have power over at work, that is not addressed. Nor is any mention made of the equalities act. Previously on this topic: Posting to the Internet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve (temporarily) signed up for the Samaritans Radar app. I thought this would be a smartphone app, but it’s not. It’s a little twitter app that reads posts looking for keywords and sends an email if it sees anything it thinks might be alarming. I’ve got two notifications so far. The first one comes from … Continue reading Trying out Samaritans Radar<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,44,16],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-big-data","tag-privacy","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4413,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/4413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe other notification was for this tweet:<\/p>\n
\nThe email told me:<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/radar1.png\")
<\/a><\/div>\n\n
My Radar<\/h3>\n
\nThis is the tweet that Radar has\u00a0spotted<\/p>\n
\n[yes] [no]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
What to do:<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
\nThis tool does not give me access to any information I did not already have access to. It only shows me tweets already visible in my timeline. Therefore, concerns that it could out somebody as trans or LGB do seem misplaced, as it only shows me what people have already decided I should be able to see. I don’t know, but I suspect it will also work with protected tweets, so it will send me alerts about tweets that aren’t public, but, again, the person decided I could already see them. (This does raise larger concerns about how twitter apps run by big data companies are a way of circumventing privacy controls set by individual users.)
\nAgain, this app draws my attention to tweets that would have been in my timeline anyway, but that I may have missed because of the massive volume of tweets that go by, or I may have scrolled past it without noticing. I can see why the Samaritans were surprised by people getting upset about privacy concerns, as this is much less invasive than is all of facebook or a lot of other twitter-based data gathering.<\/p>\n