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

gizmodo.com

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

#41

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

Atreiden wrote: post #7

> “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 SA…

Yeah 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.

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

#42

Post by noddleah »

Atreiden wrote: post #7

> “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 SA…

4k receipts

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

#43

Post by lolinder »

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.

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

#44

Post by nerdponx »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #30
dgrin91 wrote: post #16

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…

> 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.

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.

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

#45

Post by IggleSniggle »

asu_thomas wrote: post #26
thfuran wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why insist that everything is fine while the house burns down around you?

Who said anything is fine? It's both more evocative and more effective to recognize reality as reality than to insist that it's fantasy.

Although 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.

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

#46

Post by chaps »

Spooky23 wrote: post #32
excalibur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article 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.

Exactly. 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.

How is this even remotely the same thing? For one, HN doesn't use pixels to communicate directly with tiktok, Facebook, etc. And what does publicly accessible data have to do with this?

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

#47

Post by nerdponx »

Spooky23 wrote: post #32
excalibur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article 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.

Exactly. 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.

1. Search queries are not metadata.

2. Why is sharing metadata with unknown arbitrary 3rd parties OK? Not all metadata is or should be public.

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

#48

Post by Spooky23 »

lolinder wrote: post #29
excalibur wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article 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.

To 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.

Ad 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.

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

#49

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

dgrin91 wrote: post #16

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…

There is absolutely no reason for a public org to send this data to FB or Tiktok. Even if in your opinion "it's just search".

There are 2 reasons they are doing that, they actually think it's valuable data for tracking, analytics & finding similar profiles on sociale media; and that makes the concern valid. Or they just didn't think about it, and send over as much data as possible

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

#50

Post by IggleSniggle »

asu_thomas wrote: post #28
mistrial9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. 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…

Nobody 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.

67% of cognitive psychology is made up on the spot! The rest is made up in other places.
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