The College Board has a previous history of privacy issues that some students complained about. While they have no choice but to comply with the SAT and other placement exams, the non-profit organization should be responsible for keeping the students' data.
According to an exclusive report by Gizmodo, the College Board has shared the SAT scores of students with Facebook and TikTok.
The College Board Shares SAT Scores With Social Media Platforms.
A Gizmodo reporter has observed that the College Board is allowing social media companies to know about the student's SAT and GPA scores.
Using the search filtering tool, the org can search for an institution that will accept a C-graded student and those who got 420 out of 1600 SAT scores.
According to the report, the College Board made use of a tracking technology dubbed "pixels" to share the data with TikTok and Facebook.
Aside from the SAT and GPA scores, the students' user IDs were also observed to be shared on several sites.
"We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixels or cookies. 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," a College Board spokesperson said.
Pixel-Searched Scores Caught Via Screenshot
Gizmodo includes in the same report that it has the screenshot where the College Board is sending SAT scores to TikTok. It was confirmed by the spokesperson that the website of the organization was indeed doing this.
According to the non-profit's representative, pixels exist to measure how effective the College Board's advertising is.
The spokesperson adds the org did not share any personal data via pixels. The representative says that no phone numbers or names are shared with third-party apps.
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A Matter of Privacy Concern
Because The College Board has already tainted its reputation previously, privacy advocates are calling out that this practice should be stopped or held to a "higher standard."
With that, the College Board has violated the "Student Privacy Pledge," where it promised to never disclose any student information gathered through a school service. This suggests that even if the data isn't personal, the org should refrain from sending it for ad targeting.
Back in 2019, a Chicago law firm reportedly filed a class-action lawsuit against the College Board. According to the report, the organization was selling millions of data from students' records.
The lawsuit from Loevy & Loevy claimed that the College Board sold the data "without the necessary consent."
The complaint says that the College Board was paid up to $0.47 for every student name sold to third-party platforms between September 1, 2016, through December 2019.
