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The College Board website shares GPAs, SAT scores with TikTok and Facebook

183 points by mikece 3y ago

CarVac 3y ago
And yet they charge you to send scores to colleges.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
And...Such data on the open market is also available to the government, without an sort of court approval. Your phone meta data, your SAT scores, your honesty about those scores, etc. etc. As long as Big Gov is buying this abuse will continue. Sure there will be staged events by Congress, etc. but it's not going to change.
- paxys 3y ago
  Big government already has a hundred ways of getting your SAT score, for example from the admissions department of any public university in the country. It's everyone else you should be worried about. A potential employer, landlord or bank pulling your teenage SAT score without your consent and judging you based on it is a scary but very real prospect.
  - bradley13 3y ago
    "It's everyone else you should be worried about." Sure, but also worry about the government. First, the government has no more business knowing your personal details than any other organization. If they want info, that's what warrants are for. Second, people tend to thing of the government as some sort of single entity. It's not. Government is made up of people: some good, some evil, most just trying to get through the day. There have been numerous examples of the evil types abusing access to personal data, for a variety of personal (usually illegal) purposes.
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      We need privacy laws that apply to government and private sector alike. This is done elsewhere: the GDPR, for instance, applies (with some obvious exceptions) to law enforcement agencies.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Yes Big Gov does. And all those ways are 100% legal because it can buy the data on the legal market. There's a legal market for your personal info because...first and foremost it makes Big Gov's job 1000x easier *and* 100% legal. The point is simple. Big Gov has no interest in plugging this hole (i.e., protecting your privacy and personal info) because Big Gov is the Number 1 beneficiary of that hole. The worry of everyone else is an off-shoot of Big Gov's needs, not the other way around. We can worry about the symptoms or we can worry about the root problem. I favor the latter.
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      What do you define "Big Gov" as for this discussion? Just federal, or also state, city, county...? (I'm assuming we're talking about the US, since the context of this discussion is the College Board) What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data?
      - chiefalchemist 3y ago
        re: "What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data? " Exactly the point. We have no idea. No fucking clue. And making that point gets down-voted? It's nice to know HN has so many Big Gov "influencers".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dnissley 3y ago
Click bait headline: "If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed in the pixel".
- erlenmayer 3y ago
  [dead]
- jchw 3y ago
  That's not exactly an amazing catch 22, though. It's very much not going to be obvious, especially to non-technical people, that their search on CB.org will be leaked out to TikTok and Facebook, with their IP address, which for plenty of people is already enough information to identify them fairly easily. Merely hoping for the information to not be collected and abused isn't enough anymore. It needs to not be exposed in the first place.
- sam1r 3y ago
  This makes much more sense.
Atreiden 3y ago
> “We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.” > After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data. It would be comical if it weren't so dystopian.
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  This is also sharing PII of minors, no?
- asu_thomas 3y ago
  > It would be comical if it weren't so dystopian Dystopian? It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality. Why insist it's something imaginary?
  - gaulish 3y ago
    What makes a spokesperson lying “capitalism?” One can think of lying spokespersons like good ol’ Baghdad Bob operating outside of a business context.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      .. the person responding merged the thoughts ("the company spokesperson said A" + "screenshots show company doing B" ) + (the reason the company did that is $SYSTEM + the reason the spokesporson said that is $SYSTEM) this is actually a known problem in cognitive psych; the person writing did not sufficiently break up the parts. An incomplete thought chain or lazy thinking results in this kind of merged result all the time. Buddhist psychology for one, has a lot to say about the nature of this kind of lack of clarity in general.
      - 3y ago
SKarasu 3y ago
Just how deeply profiled are we? I'm genuinely curious about what big corpo categorizes me as. How well do they know me? What do they care about? What are the most crucial points that I should keep private? It really makes one wonder...
- aio2 3y ago
  What's interesting was that back in 2019, they gave access to students' data for 47¢ per name. One of the biggest customer of this was JAMRS, a military recruitment program run by the United States Department of Defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board
- karlshea 3y ago
  There’s people that think “ohh I saw that ad on a website right after talking about the same product with my friend, they must be listening on my phone’s mic”. We’re so heavily profiled they don’t even need to listen on the mic. And the feds don’t even need to spy on you, they can just buy the data of where you are and what you’re doing.
- tb_technical 3y ago
  If you're interested, look into one of their most effective and popular tools, Clear (by Reuters). For a large sum of money, you can scrape the most comprehensive database on people in the western world. It will give the buyer information on what you look like, when you were born (and whether or not you're dead), what banks you have accounts with, how many cars you own, where you live, what property you own, who you're married to, who your children are (where they live, if they're old enough and you run clears on them), social media accounts, and other info. But it's not the US government and Five Eyes spying on you - it's a private corporation... What no one mentions is that these countries have very lucrative contracts with Reuters to maintain this database for their use. The police also use it to find information on you if they feel they need to really get into your business. And companies use it to check that you're the "right fit" before hiring you. Banks use it before giving out loans to make sure you are who you say you are... I've even heard stories of some landlords using it to make sure their tenants are the "right kind of person". If you want more info on tools like these, and how to thwart them, look up "The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show" by Michael Bazzell.
dgrin91 3y ago
This seems like mostly clickbait? They don't actually share your scores, they share your search history? If you score a 2400 but search for colleges that accept 1600 then fb gets the 1600 number, not your real number of 2400. I would rather fb get nothing, but as far as data sharing and ad tracking goes, this seems fairly standard. The only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote
- junaru 3y ago
  Not 'mostly' its pure clickbait. > only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote They did not do anything wrong and they don't do what the article implies. The response is 100% correct and when confronted with 'what about this' they explained it like the non issue it is. Its HTTP GET parameters. Not for specific user but for filter range, that's it. The article is prime example why people don't trust the news.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    It isn't clickbait at all. It's a serious issue. Your interactions with the site are visible through these third parties. The college crows that they're don't provide PII, but the whole point of tracking pixels is that those services already know precisely who you are. Facebook, Tiktok, et al have tracking pixels precisely because it allows them to farm more information to fill out the profile of a user. Only the technically ignorant or dystopian don't see a profound issue with this.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > If you score a 2400 but search for colleges that accept 1600 But most people won't be doing that. For most people, it'll send their actual scores most of the time. Saying that "they don't send your actual score" is the kind of sophistry that's technically correct but also wildly inaccurate in actual cases.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    It's also ridiculous that we should be somehow OK with sending people's search queries to completely unaffiliated 3rd parties, especially search queries on personal topics like this. The argument that it's OK because it's not technically sending your actual score is so incredibly weaselly that I can only assume it's in bad faith.
oneepic 3y ago
Maybe they could send my test scores to college applications without charging a fee, using a tracking pixel? :) I seem to remember having to pick and choose where my scores went, maybe with a fee.
- jefftk 3y ago
  FB is getting scores that the user enters, and CB is just passing them along without verifying them. You pay CB when you want them to give your scores to others and attest for their accuracy.
Jot8945 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Ekaros 3y ago
And for some reason people hate GRPR and those cookie pop-ups... Like maybe this is exactly type of activity Europe wants to stop from happening...
- organsnyder 3y ago
  The regulation that led to cookie popups is actually much older: the ePrivacy Directive from 2002. The GDPR definitely got more website operators thinking about compliance, though.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Can we get some privacy laws pretty please?
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Depends where you are... Some countries only value money and profits. Others at least try to appear that they stop this stuff...
lolinder 3y ago
My biggest question with this article is why the College Board needs to/is allowed to advertise. They're ostensibly a nonprofit that has a captive audience in the form of basically every US high school student who's even considering college. The fact that they're advertising anything at all is just as concerning to me as the data they use to target those ads.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Everyone advertises. Even a completely selfless philanthropist who wants to give away a trillion dollars needs to advertise to find people to help. CB is bad, but advertising isn't why.
hgsgm 3y ago
Imagine if you had a private meeting with your school guidance counselor, and then the school sent a copy of your questions to Facebook and TikTok along with your ID # in those systems. College Board is yet another parasite that sunk its teeth into the US government-educational complex to suck our blood. https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ One of the benefits of "test optional" colleges is that now they colleges can filter for students with enough guts to refuse to do business with these crooks.
itronitron 3y ago
Why does The College Board have Facebook and TikTok pixels on it's website?
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Since U.S.A. is so good about nailing people for copyright infringement what if… PII could be copy written?
gabereiser 3y ago
“Those values are passed in the pixel, not because we configured the pixel that way but because that’s how the pixel works” I’m going to try this logic at the next sprint demo. “I didn’t code it this way, it’s just how it works…”
endisneigh 3y ago
Saying they send your search query isn’t as provocative and doesn’t feed the outrage machine so here we are.
kosievdmerwe 3y ago
It's interesting to me the differences between countries. In South Africa, the first way you get your final grade 12 results (which are used for university admissions) is via the newspapers. Every year, everyone's grades are published in a massive list everyone can see. (Later on you do get an actual certificate too.)
- raincom 3y ago
  Well, that massive list is anonymous, since only register numbers of students and their grades are published.
  - kosievdmerwe 3y ago
    That was a shock to me because it used to actually be everyone's names.
Hipoint 3y ago
As if TikTok and FB can’t already figure out who the morons are.

183 points by mikece 3y ago

And yet they charge you to send scores to colleges.

And...Such data on the open market is also available to the government, without an sort of court approval. Your phone meta data, your SAT scores, your honesty about those scores, etc. etc. As long as Big Gov is buying this abuse will continue. Sure there will be staged events by Congress, etc. but it's not going to change.

paxys 3y ago
Big government already has a hundred ways of getting your SAT score, for example from the admissions department of any public university in the country. It's everyone else you should be worried about. A potential employer, landlord or bank pulling your teenage SAT score without your consent and judging you based on it is a scary but very real prospect.
- bradley13 3y ago
  "It's everyone else you should be worried about." Sure, but also worry about the government. First, the government has no more business knowing your personal details than any other organization. If they want info, that's what warrants are for. Second, people tend to thing of the government as some sort of single entity. It's not. Government is made up of people: some good, some evil, most just trying to get through the day. There have been numerous examples of the evil types abusing access to personal data, for a variety of personal (usually illegal) purposes.
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    We need privacy laws that apply to government and private sector alike. This is done elsewhere: the GDPR, for instance, applies (with some obvious exceptions) to law enforcement agencies.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Yes Big Gov does. And all those ways are 100% legal because it can buy the data on the legal market. There's a legal market for your personal info because...first and foremost it makes Big Gov's job 1000x easier *and* 100% legal. The point is simple. Big Gov has no interest in plugging this hole (i.e., protecting your privacy and personal info) because Big Gov is the Number 1 beneficiary of that hole. The worry of everyone else is an off-shoot of Big Gov's needs, not the other way around. We can worry about the symptoms or we can worry about the root problem. I favor the latter.
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    What do you define "Big Gov" as for this discussion? Just federal, or also state, city, county...? (I'm assuming we're talking about the US, since the context of this discussion is the College Board) What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data?
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      re: "What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data? " Exactly the point. We have no idea. No fucking clue. And making that point gets down-voted? It's nice to know HN has so many Big Gov "influencers".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dnissley 3y ago

Click bait headline: "If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed in the pixel".

erlenmayer 3y ago
[dead]
jchw 3y ago
That's not exactly an amazing catch 22, though. It's very much not going to be obvious, especially to non-technical people, that their search on CB.org will be leaked out to TikTok and Facebook, with their IP address, which for plenty of people is already enough information to identify them fairly easily. Merely hoping for the information to not be collected and abused isn't enough anymore. It needs to not be exposed in the first place.
sam1r 3y ago
This makes much more sense.

Atreiden 3y ago

> “We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.” > After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data. It would be comical if it weren't so dystopian.

rgrieselhuber 3y ago
This is also sharing PII of minors, no?
asu_thomas 3y ago
> It would be comical if it weren't so dystopian Dystopian? It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality. Why insist it's something imaginary?
- gaulish 3y ago
  What makes a spokesperson lying “capitalism?” One can think of lying spokespersons like good ol’ Baghdad Bob operating outside of a business context.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    .. the person responding merged the thoughts ("the company spokesperson said A" + "screenshots show company doing B" ) + (the reason the company did that is $SYSTEM + the reason the spokesporson said that is $SYSTEM) this is actually a known problem in cognitive psych; the person writing did not sufficiently break up the parts. An incomplete thought chain or lazy thinking results in this kind of merged result all the time. Buddhist psychology for one, has a lot to say about the nature of this kind of lack of clarity in general.
    - 3y ago

SKarasu 3y ago

Just how deeply profiled are we? I'm genuinely curious about what big corpo categorizes me as. How well do they know me? What do they care about? What are the most crucial points that I should keep private? It really makes one wonder...

aio2 3y ago
What's interesting was that back in 2019, they gave access to students' data for 47¢ per name. One of the biggest customer of this was JAMRS, a military recruitment program run by the United States Department of Defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board
karlshea 3y ago
There’s people that think “ohh I saw that ad on a website right after talking about the same product with my friend, they must be listening on my phone’s mic”. We’re so heavily profiled they don’t even need to listen on the mic. And the feds don’t even need to spy on you, they can just buy the data of where you are and what you’re doing.
tb_technical 3y ago
If you're interested, look into one of their most effective and popular tools, Clear (by Reuters). For a large sum of money, you can scrape the most comprehensive database on people in the western world. It will give the buyer information on what you look like, when you were born (and whether or not you're dead), what banks you have accounts with, how many cars you own, where you live, what property you own, who you're married to, who your children are (where they live, if they're old enough and you run clears on them), social media accounts, and other info. But it's not the US government and Five Eyes spying on you - it's a private corporation... What no one mentions is that these countries have very lucrative contracts with Reuters to maintain this database for their use. The police also use it to find information on you if they feel they need to really get into your business. And companies use it to check that you're the "right fit" before hiring you. Banks use it before giving out loans to make sure you are who you say you are... I've even heard stories of some landlords using it to make sure their tenants are the "right kind of person". If you want more info on tools like these, and how to thwart them, look up "The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show" by Michael Bazzell.

dgrin91 3y ago

This seems like mostly clickbait? They don't actually share your scores, they share your search history? If you score a 2400 but search for colleges that accept 1600 then fb gets the 1600 number, not your real number of 2400. I would rather fb get nothing, but as far as data sharing and ad tracking goes, this seems fairly standard. The only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote

junaru 3y ago
Not 'mostly' its pure clickbait. > only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote They did not do anything wrong and they don't do what the article implies. The response is 100% correct and when confronted with 'what about this' they explained it like the non issue it is. Its HTTP GET parameters. Not for specific user but for filter range, that's it. The article is prime example why people don't trust the news.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  It isn't clickbait at all. It's a serious issue. Your interactions with the site are visible through these third parties. The college crows that they're don't provide PII, but the whole point of tracking pixels is that those services already know precisely who you are. Facebook, Tiktok, et al have tracking pixels precisely because it allows them to farm more information to fill out the profile of a user. Only the technically ignorant or dystopian don't see a profound issue with this.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> If you score a 2400 but search for colleges that accept 1600 But most people won't be doing that. For most people, it'll send their actual scores most of the time. Saying that "they don't send your actual score" is the kind of sophistry that's technically correct but also wildly inaccurate in actual cases.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  It's also ridiculous that we should be somehow OK with sending people's search queries to completely unaffiliated 3rd parties, especially search queries on personal topics like this. The argument that it's OK because it's not technically sending your actual score is so incredibly weaselly that I can only assume it's in bad faith.

oneepic 3y ago

Maybe they could send my test scores to college applications without charging a fee, using a tracking pixel? :) I seem to remember having to pick and choose where my scores went, maybe with a fee.

jefftk 3y ago
FB is getting scores that the user enters, and CB is just passing them along without verifying them. You pay CB when you want them to give your scores to others and attest for their accuracy.

Jot8945 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Ekaros 3y ago

And for some reason people hate GRPR and those cookie pop-ups... Like maybe this is exactly type of activity Europe wants to stop from happening...

organsnyder 3y ago
The regulation that led to cookie popups is actually much older: the ePrivacy Directive from 2002. The GDPR definitely got more website operators thinking about compliance, though.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Can we get some privacy laws pretty please?

Ekaros 3y ago
Depends where you are... Some countries only value money and profits. Others at least try to appear that they stop this stuff...

lolinder 3y ago

My biggest question with this article is why the College Board needs to/is allowed to advertise. They're ostensibly a nonprofit that has a captive audience in the form of basically every US high school student who's even considering college. The fact that they're advertising anything at all is just as concerning to me as the data they use to target those ads.

hgsgm 3y ago
Everyone advertises. Even a completely selfless philanthropist who wants to give away a trillion dollars needs to advertise to find people to help. CB is bad, but advertising isn't why.

hgsgm 3y ago

Imagine if you had a private meeting with your school guidance counselor, and then the school sent a copy of your questions to Facebook and TikTok along with your ID # in those systems. College Board is yet another parasite that sunk its teeth into the US government-educational complex to suck our blood. https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ One of the benefits of "test optional" colleges is that now they colleges can filter for students with enough guts to refuse to do business with these crooks.

itronitron 3y ago

Why does The College Board have Facebook and TikTok pixels on it's website?

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Since U.S.A. is so good about nailing people for copyright infringement what if… PII could be copy written?

gabereiser 3y ago

“Those values are passed in the pixel, not because we configured the pixel that way but because that’s how the pixel works” I’m going to try this logic at the next sprint demo. “I didn’t code it this way, it’s just how it works…”

endisneigh 3y ago

Saying they send your search query isn’t as provocative and doesn’t feed the outrage machine so here we are.

kosievdmerwe 3y ago

It's interesting to me the differences between countries. In South Africa, the first way you get your final grade 12 results (which are used for university admissions) is via the newspapers. Every year, everyone's grades are published in a massive list everyone can see. (Later on you do get an actual certificate too.)

raincom 3y ago
Well, that massive list is anonymous, since only register numbers of students and their grades are published.
- kosievdmerwe 3y ago
  That was a shock to me because it used to actually be everyone's names.

Hipoint 3y ago

As if TikTok and FB can’t already figure out who the morons are.