Samaritans Radar some thoughts
I’ve been following this for a bunch of reasons, so here are my thoughts on the matter
Data protection :- The Samaritans say they aren’t a data controller & I agree. I’m not convinced an email address & a twitter handle constitute personal data. My experience is they are not enough together to uniquely identify a person. They also say they aren’t a data processor. How can that be ? Radar reads tweets & acts on what it finds. Well its a legal definition, no data controller has engaged them, so no they aren’t a data processor.
Privacy :- Here is where people have been getting heated, I sort of understand why, but the radar app acted on public posts. This is pretty important, especially for the data protection above. The rules for published data are very different. Twitter's API makes it reasonably easy to read the feed of public posts a twitter handle sees. (https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/user_timeline explains quite well).
Accuracy:-
From my reading it seems radar is a Heuristic, keyword scanner, much like an anti-spam system, you'd expect it to generate both false positives & false negatives, especially in the early days. If I was programming something like that I'd favour false positives over false negatives.
Bullying:-
A sad fact really, it didn't enable bullying, it might have made it easier though.
I'm not sure what to make of radar & the kerfuffle surrounding it, I didn't sign up to it (I have my reasons) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was active on my timeline somewhere. I don't think there were data protection concerns, and to be frank if you have privacy concerns why are you publishing in a global forum ? A twitter public status is just that a status that can be read by anyone, anywhere (but not at any time, they sort of expire)
