Gizmodo's tests find the College Board website shares GPAs, SAT scores, and other information with Facebook and TikTok via tracking pixels. The College Board has a years-long history of sharing and selling student data.
It sounds like it's just trusting whatever people plonk in in searches, so you can presumably poison their database with whatever GPA and SAT score you want.
“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 [to Facebook]”
So they don’t associate your official score to your browser, but presumably students who are using that search tool would be searching their real score - or a range close to it.
The headline is fairly leading, but the statement from the College Board is also fairly misleading. They’re not directly selling your official score to advertisers, but they’re indirectly selling data about you that gives a pretty good idea of your score.
“Anonymous” is a super broad term in tracking. All it means is that you are given a unique ID by Facebook while they track you. But that ID is the same across any site that integrates Pixel. So they have a metric ton of your browsing data tied to the same ID even though it’s across a few dozen or hundred websites. They also use that same ID when you’re on Facebook itself, so they can serve ads based on that ID instead of your Facebook account. It helps them to skirt some privacy requirements while still building a super detailed profile of you.
That’s what I meant. “Anonymous” in the sense Facebook only assigns you a number. The meta data in aggregate is what would probably identify you.
I was trying to figure out how the college board was passing test scores with a confirmation of identity not just attaching a query history with a very strong potential for accuracy.
They’re not even selling it, they’re just giving it away due to incompetence.
They added the pixel to track their ad click through rate (and to automatically optimize the targeting based on people who click through).
The pixel sends off the URL of the current page when a user visits. The search form put the GPA you entered to search for in the URL, so it gets sent off as part of the URL.
There’s no way Facebook even realized this or utilized the data in any way, it just happens to be in the URL by mistake and they get millions of URLs sent to themselves every second, no way do they actually bother to sit and analyze what’s in them.
Something important to note is that this is being shared through Facebook’s Pixel service.
Pixel is similar to Google Analytics, but Facebook is also more aggressive in forcing companies to use Pixel, and what’s even worse is that any data shared with Pixel can be made available to other companies very quickly and easily.
From a marketing standpoint it’s brilliant because it gives you the chance to see what other websites you may share audiences with and how to convert some of that.
From a privacy standpoint it’s a nightmare, and the fact that the data you’re entering onto a website is tracked by it and accessible is a huge problem that needs to (but won’t) be addressed. I really wish that there wasn’t such a large population of people who have just latched onto Facebook because they are a plague to privacy.
Source: Worked as a web developer for a marketing company for 2 years and had to do a lot of Facebook integrations.
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