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.
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.
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.
Thank you for the clarification.
Right, my concern was how the official score was being attached to a pixel while still staying “ anonymous”.
Attached to a…pixel?
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.