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

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This makes much more sense.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

4k receipts

It'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.

A 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.

This is also sharing PII of minors, no?

Well, that massive list is anonymous, since only register numbers of students and their grades are published.

Depends where you are... Some countries only value money and profits.

Others at least try to appear that they stop this stuff...

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.

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.