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Comment by Atreiden | Hacker News Reader

> “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.

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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.

Yeah, often companies will make that kind of claim based on the fact they only pass around sha256 hashes of email addresses, which are trivially deanonymized.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/09/four-cents-to-deano...

Now imagine this being used by employers to weed out candidates.

Or advertisers, to target the "least intelligent" with their campaigns. (Which I'm sure they already do by proxy.)

Already seems to be happening but much more upfront. In recent months, I've had two potential employers require I take a "personality" test but only about a quarter of the questions were personality/character attribute based, the rest were clearly intelligence questions, mostly recognizing patterns and testing memory. Tech companies have been pushing the limits of the "directly related to the job" exemption allowed by the Duke Power v Griggs decision for years. Looks like some are ready to simply ignore that court ruling entirely.

While employers can't generally request SAT scores from the College Board, they can already request candidates to provide them if they want to.

This 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.

They lied.

No, 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.

So if they are this stupid, why are they trusted to administer these tests?

I think they shouldn't be, but that's a separate question from whether this spokesperson lied.

it's kind of like a developer saying: "not on my browser"

At best it's incompetence/lack of due diligence.

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?

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.

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.

I'm still enraged even after framing this as "it's just search parameters, all search parameters are tracked". It sounds as silly as the NSA's "it's just metadata"

In other words, they are sending your scores.

There's an obvious (and probably very tight) correlation between what scores students search for, and what scores they actually got. The fact that they're selling that data to advertisers indicates it has practical meaning, and it's hard to see what other value that data could provide.

Why would they even send search parameter info to Facebook, tiktok, etc? Genuinely don't see how that makes it any better. It's arguably worse.

You send us your data, we give you better ad campaigns as well as better metrics/insights about performance.

Nah I get that. It doesn't really answer the question from a moral perspective though. My hunch is they just have no idea what their pixels do, so the moral question wasn't raised.

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?

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.

My point, poorly made, is that the statements made by companies sharing this data don’t mean what they appear to at first reading.

Even in the silly HN example, you can analyze referrer data and build profiles of people, without any cooperation on HNs part.

4k receipts

> 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?

Dystopian is not always imaginative, however most of the time people assume it is. It's just a negative adjective.

dystopia /dɪsˈtəʊpɪə/ noun an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

Guess that must be an old definition from back before we lived in one?

Imaginative != imagined

fun fact, I was typing "imaginary" but got auto-corrected

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.

Dystopia does not mean fantasy

Are Dystopias only fictional?

Definitely. 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.

It's funny to try to accuse someone else of living in fantasy while pushing a fantastical notion of what capitalism is.

What makes a spokesperson lying “capitalism?” One can think of lying spokespersons like good ol’ Baghdad Bob operating outside of a business context.

Because in their opinion, anything bad I'm the world can just be reduced to one problem. Their pet critique of economic philosophy.

The College Board is a financial scam (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/

The 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.

.. 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.

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.

I 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.

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

>> It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality.

> Nobody ascribed a cause to anything.

.... those two statements contradict directly... followed by scatology..

> 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.

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