According to Gizmodo, the College Board is sharing personal student information such as SAT scores and grade point averages with social media giants Facebook and Chinese owned TikTok. The data allegedly being shared involves ‘pixels,’ an invisible tracking technology used to deliver targeted ads to Internet users. No doubt you have seen this when you have read an offbeat article or clicked onto an offbeat website just to suddenly find an overwhelming number of ads for that company and/or its competitors.
Gizmodo reports the College Board was not caught selling personal information such as names, phone numbers or email addresses this time. However, the pixels often contain unique combinations of letters and numbers meant to identify individual Internet browsers and security experts have argued this practice raises serious privacy concern issues. Additionally, the College Board was caught selling data about students for as little as $0.47. Whether this should be viewed as a serious risk for repeating given the organization’s reliance on a market that may be dying is up for individual interpretation.
It is also worth noting that College Board initially denied the allegations and only acknowledged them when Gizmodo confronted them with evidence to the contrary. If you find this story disconcerting, please share it with others to help ensure it doesn’t inadvertently get “swept under the rug” by the mainstream media. This blog post is our meager contribution to keeping this story alive and hopefully shared with many others.
