To Our Community,

Our service works and saves lives because of the trust that our volunteer and texter communities have placed in us. Your trust is critical to fulfilling our mission of building a more empathetic world. Our goal is always to make it easier for anyone to get help, and to feel supported and safe in doing so. 

During these past days, we have listened closely to our community’s concerns. We hear you. Crisis Text Line has had an open and public relationship with Loris AI. We understand that you don’t want Crisis Text Line to share any data with Loris, even though the data is handled securely, anonymized and scrubbed of personally identifiable information. As a result, we have ended our data-sharing relationship with Loris. This change includes our request that Loris delete the data it has received from Crisis Text Line. We have updated our Terms of Service & Privacy Policy accordingly to reflect this change. (Note: While a data sharing relationship has existed, Loris has not accessed any data since the beginning of 2020.)

We heard your feedback that it should be clear and easy for anyone in crisis to understand what they are consenting to when they reach out for help. And, we are making several changes to further improve the experience for texters and to increase transparency for the users of our service. We have added an easy to understand bulleted summary to the top of our terms of service. We will accelerate additional efforts to test new ways to safely improve our texter experience and the way texters can consent to our terms without creating barriers to reach a volunteer Crisis Counselor. We will continue to listen to experts and our community and solicit feedback on improving our consent process. 

Whenever any organization has the information of others, they should be held to a higher standard. We have invested significant time and resources into building a mental health crisis intervention service where texters and volunteers can feel safe and secure. We will always aim to hold ourselves to the highest standards. We are grateful for the feedback from community members and experts. We welcome your ideas regarding the improvement of our terms or processes for consent, here or at feedback@crisistextline.org. We will continue to listen, evaluate and share updates on the ways we can best serve you, our community.