It's hard for me to believe this is just sloppiness, even. The headline, subhead, and podcast link all say "before they apply". The lede is the story of a stude

It's hard for me to believe this is just sloppiness, even. The headline, subhead, and podcast link all say "before they apply". The lede is the story of a student visiting the site and being profiled, and all of the data listed could plausibly have come from somewhere outside an application. It's only ten paragraphs later that the article returns to the initial story and clarifies that the profile was derived from her application. The use of cookies in this way is novel for universities, if not for other sites. And some of the other moves like classifying contractors as "school officials" look like blatant attempts to bypass privacy laws. But the headline here vastly oversells what's happening; the amount of data available prior to an application doesn't seem much different than what I remember getting in unsolicited university ads. That's been happening at the very least since the College Board decided to sell all sorts of exam information to universities.