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.

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"

In other words, they are sending your scores.

Exactly.

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?

1. Search queries are not metadata.

2. Why is sharing metadata with unknown arbitrary 3rd parties OK? Not all metadata is or should be public.

My point, poorly made, is that the statements made by companies sharing this data don’t mean what they appear to at first reading.

Even in the silly HN example, you can analyze referrer data and build profiles of people, without any cooperation on HNs part.

Why would they even send search parameter info to Facebook, tiktok, etc? Genuinely don't see how that makes it any better. It's arguably worse, even!!

You send us your data, we give you better ad campaigns as well as better metrics/insights about performance.

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.