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> “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,
by 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 agoThis 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 agoWhat 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.
- asu_thomas 3y agoNobody ascribed a cause to anything. My only point is that it's reality, not imagination. People just making shit up is also a known problem in cognitive psychology. Very interesting stuff.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago67% of cognitive psychology is made up on the spot! The rest is made up in other places.
- mistrial9 3y ago>> It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality. > Nobody ascribed a cause to anything. .... those two statements contradict directly... followed by scatology..
- Sirizarry 3y agoI think you’re really misunderstanding the context in which the word dystopian is used here. It’s just a negative adjective. No one is saying this is imagination.
- hgsgm 3y agoThe College Board is a financial scam (https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/) but arguably its flaws aren't technically Capitalist. Facebook and TikTok are, though. There's no reason for a school test-taking website to partner with Facebook and TikTok accept because these companies are providing some service (of dubious value, like College Board itself!) to drive their own profit. https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/ https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/
- asu_thomas 3y agoThe College Board is a perfectly legal enterprise, and how could you know their reasons for how they do things? Besides, they are a "not-for-profit" organization so we know for a fact that they don't want profit.
- stale2002 3y agoBecause in their opinion, anything bad I'm the world can just be reduced to one problem. Their pet critique of economic philosophy.
- thfuran 3y agoWhy insist that everything is fine while the house burns down around you?
- asu_thomas 3y agoWho said anything is fine? It's both more evocative and more effective to recognize reality as reality than to insist that it's fantasy.
- LightHugger 3y agoDystopia does not mean fantasy
- IggleSniggle 3y agoAlthough one definition of dystopia is specifically about imaginary future states, this is not the only connotation for the word. I would hazard to say that most people would understand you perfectly if you said "we are living in a dystopia," without believing you were trying to say we are living in a fantasy land.
- firtoz 3y agoDystopian is not always imaginative, however most of the time people assume it is. It's just a negative adjective.
- airza 3y agodystopia /dɪsˈtəʊpɪə/ noun an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
- singleshot_ 3y agoGuess that must be an old definition from back before we lived in one?
- hiatus 3y agoImaginative != imagined
- firtoz 3y agofun fact, I was typing "imaginary" but got auto-corrected
- deadbunny 3y agoAre Dystopias only fictional?
- erellsworth 3y ago> Dystopian? It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality. Why insist it's something imaginary? Maybe because plain capitalism in regular reality is pretty dystopian. Nothing imaginary about it.
- karaterobot 3y agoDefinitely. I want to live in one of those non-capitalist countries, where they don't track people. The names of these countries escape me at the moment.
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's funny to try to accuse someone else of living in fantasy while pushing a fantastical notion of what capitalism is.
- excalibur 3y agoArticle is clickbait/ragebait. They're not sending your scores. If you do a search for colleges who accept scores in a certain range, your search parameters are tracked, just like any other search parameters.
- ComplexSystems 3y agoIn other words, they are sending your scores.
- lolinder 3y agoTo be fair to Gizmodo, most people won't search for colleges using ranges that don't match their actual or expected scores. It's like a search for "pregnancy symptoms" on Google—sure it doesn't specifically tell Google that you or someone close to you is pregnant, but you'll start seeing ads for baby stuff anyway because odds are you are.
- Spooky23 3y agoAd platforms can be far more insidious with that data. If you’re a male, age 45, with kids, and you suddenly are looking for apartments and your porn habits change, you’re going to get more gambling ads. Companies use third party data to correlate outside activity to Google. The government has used it to deter radicalization and to redirect people with opioid issues. You can compare online behaviors with say health insurance claims and lifestyle factors and score likelihood of events. Once that correlation is done, you can target ads to influence behavior.
- Spooky23 3y agoExactly. Hacker News is the same way. HN does not send your HN handle information to any third party. That said, your posts and comments include certain metadata, including your HN handle and a link to account metadata as per the privacy policy. This data is public and may be accessed by third parties.
- chaps 3y ago
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoYeah and then still claim that it can't be traced to the person, where the whole point of the pixel is to lead it back to their fb profile. The spokesperson is either being fed false information or blatantly lying. At least someone in the organization is.
- lolinder 3y agoThis is overly harsh. The spokesperson assumed they were being accused of abusing their position of running the SAT by actually sending real SAT scores directly to Facebook, so they responded accordingly. Instead they were abusing their position of trust to get students to enter the scores again themselves and sending that. Still not great, but not a lie on the spokesperson's part, just a misunderstanding of what was meant.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoit's kind of like a developer saying: "not on my browser"
- junofan 3y agoThey lied.
- lolinder 3y agoNo, they didn't, they responded to the question they thought they were being asked. The form fields on their college search page weren't even in their working memory at the time. This is a case of the College Board negligently failing to recognize these fields as sensitive data, not a case of them outright lying. Still bad, obviously, but stupid rather than nefarious.
- hiatus 3y agoSo if they are this stupid, why are they trusted to administer these tests?
- noddleah 3y ago4k receipts
- hgsgm 3y agoIt's accurate but deceptive. CB does not send PII. Your SAT scores or estimates thereof are your private data, but not Personally Identifying Facebook and TikTok already have the PII! And that's why it's bad for CB to share the data. CB is evil, but in this particular case they're just being stupid not shady, and shady FB and TikTok benefit from it.
- api 3y agoA lot of organizations just slather up their sites with all kinds of trackers and have absolutely no idea what they are sharing and with whom. It's an absolute dumpster fire that can only be fixed with legislation as the web is just not designed to prevent tracking in any way. There is far too much security "surface area" for a workable technical solution without re-engineering the entire ecosystem. That legislation is of course unlikely because political parties, think tanks, governments, and propagandists all want to gather as much information as possible for their own purposes. Literally every single financial, political, and social incentive points toward maximization of surveillance everywhere. I feel like it's pretty hopeless without something very bad happening and causing a huge grassroots movement that can't easily be ignored.