And...Such data on the open market is also available to the government, without an sort of court approval. Your phone meta data, your SAT scores, your honesty about those scores, etc. etc.
As long as Big Gov is buying this abuse will continue. Sure there will be staged events by Congress, etc. but it's not going to change.
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.
Sure, but also worry about the government. First, the government has no more business knowing your personal details than any other organization. If they want info, that's what warrants are for.
Second, people tend to thing of the government as some sort of single entity. It's not. Government is made up of people: some good, some evil, most just trying to get through the day. There have been numerous examples of the evil types abusing access to personal data, for a variety of personal (usually illegal) purposes.
We need privacy laws that apply to government and private sector alike. This is done elsewhere: the GDPR, for instance, applies (with some obvious exceptions) to law enforcement agencies.
Yes Big Gov does. And all those ways are 100% legal because it can buy the data on the legal market. There's a legal market for your personal info because...first and foremost it makes Big Gov's job 1000x easier *and* 100% legal. The point is simple. Big Gov has no interest in plugging this hole (i.e., protecting your privacy and personal info) because Big Gov is the Number 1 beneficiary of that hole.
The worry of everyone else is an off-shoot of Big Gov's needs, not the other way around. We can worry about the symptoms or we can worry about the root problem. I favor the latter.
What do you define "Big Gov" as for this discussion? Just federal, or also state, city, county...? (I'm assuming we're talking about the US, since the context of this discussion is the College Board)
What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data?
Click bait headline: "If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed in the pixel".
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.
> “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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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
/dɪsˈtəʊpɪə/
noun
an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just how deeply profiled are we? I'm genuinely curious about what big corpo categorizes me as. How well do they know me? What do they care about? What are the most crucial points that I should keep private? It really makes one wonder...
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.
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.
This seems like mostly clickbait? They don't actually share your scores, they share your search history? If you score a 2400 but search for colleges that accept 1600 then fb gets the 1600 number, not your real number of 2400.
I would rather fb get nothing, but as far as data sharing and ad tracking goes, this seems fairly standard. The only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote
> 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.
Your interactions with the site are visible through these third parties. The college crows that they're don't provide PII, but the whole point of tracking pixels is that those services already know precisely who you are. Facebook, Tiktok, et al have tracking pixels precisely because it allows them to farm more information to fill out the profile of a user.
Only the technically ignorant or dystopian don't see a profound issue with this.
It's also ridiculous that we should be somehow OK with sending people's search queries to completely unaffiliated 3rd parties, especially search queries on personal topics like this.
The argument that it's OK because it's not technically sending your actual score is so incredibly weaselly that I can only assume it's in bad faith.
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
Its not a public org though. - its non-profit. I'm not a fan of sharing search data either, but I think its unfair to put extra shame on College Board.
If it's the org managing the student's GPA it's public since it's dealing with public information citizens are unable to opt out off, independent of it's legal entity.
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.
My biggest question with this article is why the College Board needs to/is allowed to advertise. They're ostensibly a nonprofit that has a captive audience in the form of basically every US high school student who's even considering college.
The fact that they're advertising anything at all is just as concerning to me as the data they use to target those ads.
Imagine if you had a private meeting with your school guidance counselor, and then the school sent a copy of your questions to Facebook and TikTok along with your ID # in those systems.
College Board is yet another parasite that sunk its teeth into the US government-educational complex to suck our blood.
One of the benefits of "test optional" colleges is that now they colleges can filter for students with enough guts to refuse to do business with these crooks.
It's interesting to me the differences between countries. In South Africa, the first way you get your final grade 12 results (which are used for university admissions) is via the newspapers. Every year, everyone's grades are published in a massive list everyone can see.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadAs long as Big Gov is buying this abuse will continue. Sure there will be staged events by Congress, etc. but it's not going to change.
Sure, but also worry about the government. First, the government has no more business knowing your personal details than any other organization. If they want info, that's what warrants are for.
Second, people tend to thing of the government as some sort of single entity. It's not. Government is made up of people: some good, some evil, most just trying to get through the day. There have been numerous examples of the evil types abusing access to personal data, for a variety of personal (usually illegal) purposes.
The worry of everyone else is an off-shoot of Big Gov's needs, not the other way around. We can worry about the symptoms or we can worry about the root problem. I favor the latter.
What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data?
Exactly the point. We have no idea. No fucking clue.
And making that point gets down-voted? It's nice to know HN has so many Big Gov "influencers".
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.
> 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.
Dystopian? It's literally just plain capitalism in regular reality. Why insist it's something imaginary?
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.
People just making shit up is also a known problem in cognitive psychology. Very interesting stuff.
> Nobody ascribed a cause to anything.
.... those two statements contradict directly... followed by scatology..
Maybe because plain capitalism in regular reality is pretty dystopian. Nothing imaginary about it.
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.
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.
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.
2. Why is sharing metadata with unknown arbitrary 3rd parties OK? Not all metadata is or should be public.
Even in the silly HN example, you can analyze referrer data and build profiles of people, without any cooperation on HNs part.
The spokesperson is either being fed false information or blatantly lying. At least someone in the organization is.
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.
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.
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/09/four-cents-to-deano...
Or advertisers, to target the "least intelligent" with their campaigns. (Which I'm sure they already do by proxy.)
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board
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.
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.
I would rather fb get nothing, but as far as data sharing and ad tracking goes, this seems fairly standard. The only surprising part of this story is that they managed to find a stupid pr person who gave a bad quote
> 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.
Your interactions with the site are visible through these third parties. The college crows that they're don't provide PII, but the whole point of tracking pixels is that those services already know precisely who you are. Facebook, Tiktok, et al have tracking pixels precisely because it allows them to farm more information to fill out the profile of a user.
Only the technically ignorant or dystopian don't see a profound issue with this.
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.
The argument that it's OK because it's not technically sending your actual score is so incredibly weaselly that I can only assume it's in bad faith.
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
You can complain that the way the world works is broken & should be fixed, but you can't redefine words to make your argument.
I seem to remember having to pick and choose where my scores went, maybe with a fee.
You pay CB when you want them to give your scores to others and attest for their accuracy.
Others at least try to appear that they stop this stuff...
The fact that they're advertising anything at all is just as concerning to me as the data they use to target those ads.
CB is bad, but advertising isn't why.
College Board is yet another parasite that sunk its teeth into the US government-educational complex to suck our blood.
https://www.therealcollegeboard.org/
One of the benefits of "test optional" colleges is that now they colleges can filter for students with enough guts to refuse to do business with these crooks.
I’m going to try this logic at the next sprint demo. “I didn’t code it this way, it’s just how it works…”
(Later on you do get an actual certificate too.)