Comment by praxulus
3 years ago
Maybe this would just make me a bad service admin, but if I believed that I would be literally saving someone's life by sharing data from one of my users with law enforcement, I would be hard pressed to hold their privacy above another's life.
Exactly what it takes to be reasonably convinced that I would be saving someone's life is of course not a simple question, but in at least some situations it seems like it would be worth the tradeoff.
One that I've run into several times is suicide. Most of the time, the person isn't in immediate danger. I've been around when people were.
I'm not going to go into any detail for people's privacy, but it took over an hour to figure out who a regular member of a community was in real life and then get emergency services in another country to them. Got independent confirmation they got dragged to a hospital in time. They weren't exactly grateful afterwards, but they stayed in the community and didn't repeat the attempt.
Faked requests for situations like this are routinely and frequently used for harassment/attempted murder in gaming. Unless this is solvable, this is rather problematic and dangerous.
Maybe I should have clarified, I don’t act on the vast majority of things in this manner, especially when I don’t know the person or the circumstances. Unless I have some method of confirmation, escalating to emergency services is not happening. Even then, it’s last resort for precisely this reason.
Why not end to end encryption so we don’t need to even discuss this.