this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
427 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
9 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.