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Suicide hotline websites promising anonymity are sharing data with Facebook
Websites directing people in crisis to mental health resources are also quietly sharing sensitive data about visitors with Facebook, The Markup’s Colin Lecher and Jon Keegan report in an investigation co-published with STAT. Those websites, linked to the national crisis hotline 988, use a Meta Pixel tracker, which gathers data about website visitors and shares it with Meta in exchange for detailed analytics. The analysis of 186 local crisis center websites found the shared data often included signals to Facebook when visitors clicked on dedicated call buttons for mental health emergencies. In some cases, users’ contact information — including names and email addresses that could easily be unscrambled — were also transmitted. Read the full investigation here.
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