College Board sold student data for 47 cents each, lawsuit claims

guest · Dec 17, 2019

College Board sold student data for 47 cents each, lawsuit claims
December 16, 2019
https://edscoop.com/college-board-student-data-lawsuit/

College Board, the nonprofit that develops and administers SAT and Advanced Placement exams, is being accused of selling more than five million students’ personal information, according to a lawsuit filed in Chicago last week.
[...] sell student information using “unfair and deceptive means,” and that the organization failed to obtain proper consent for data collection and dissemination.

By opting in to the Student Search Survey, students agree to share data — including name, grade, home address, gender and ethnicity — with colleges and scholarship programs under assurance from the College Board that their participation would assist them in the college application process. However, the complaint claims otherwise.

“College Board’s true purpose in obtaining the personal information was to sell it to third party organizations in order to increase its already substantial revenues [...]” the complaint states.
Click to expand...

“There are important conversations that need to happen around privacy,”Attai said. “For schools and districts and even for companies, there is no guidance on any of these laws and we don’t have implementing regulations.”
Although student data privacy laws may have specific provisions prohibiting the sale of data, there are other requirements that are wide open to interpretation, Attai said.
Click to expand...

guest · Jul 31, 2020

The College Board Is Sharing Student Data Once Again
...in ways that may contradict its own policies
July 30, 2020
https://www.consumerreports.org/col...ege-board-is-sharing-student-data-once-again/

For millions of students, the College Board is the gatekeeper to higher education. And according to a Consumer Reports investigation, the organization uses that role to collect and share information on those students—despite apparent promises to the contrary.

The list includes Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, Yahoo, and an advertising network called AdMedia.
The personal information was relayed to these companies in a manner that appears to violate specific privacy promises made by the College Board. In some cases, it also appeared to be linked to ads for products and services beyond the organization’s scope.

“The data sharing we observed would allow for a broad range of profiling,” says Bill Fitzgerald, the privacy researcher who conducted the tests for the Consumer Reports Digital Lab.
Click to expand...

How the Student Data Was Shared
The College Board’s privacy policy makes explicit claims about sharing user data. The document defines a username as personal information, then goes on to say that “no personally identifiable information is shared” with third parties that perform advertising services, specifically citing Facebook.

But what we observed contradicts that promise. (For the detailed report, click here.)
Click to expand...

This isn’t the first time the College Board has been called out for privacy issues. In 2018, a year in which the organization generated over a billion dollars in tax-exempt revenue, a New York Times investigation found it was one of several education vendors that sold access to student survey data.
In 2019, a Wall Street Journal article reported that the College Board had sold the names of SAT test takers to colleges for 47 cents apiece.

In this case, however, there’s no evidence to suggest the College Board is selling the data we saw changing hands. The tech companies that corresponded with us confirmed that.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

College Board sold student data for 47 cents each, lawsuit claims

guest Guest

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

College Board sold student data for 47 cents each, lawsuit claims

guest Guest

guest Guest

Useful Searches