Facebook Watches Teens Online As They Prep for College

Building on a University of Chicago/NYU study that scraped links from over 60,000 U.S. school websites, The Markup used its Blacklight tool and network-traffic analysis to check more than 30 education-related websites for Meta's tracking pixel. It found the pixel embedded on sites central to college preparation and enrollment, including ACT registration and login pages, the Common App, Prezi, ArbiterSports, Jostens, and the NFHS Network, platforms that together reach tens of millions of students annually, including roughly 1.4 million ACT test-takers in 2022 and over a million annual Common App users.

Where the pixel fired, Meta received data such as hashed emails, names, test-registration status, ethnicity and gender, financial-aid requests, and disability-accommodation information. Some sites aimed at children under 13 carried pixels on public pages, though login-only student pages did not. The investigation concludes that while COPPA covers under-13 users, teenagers remain largely unprotected by federal privacy law, schools lack capacity to vet these risks, and Meta's own mitigations and pending legislation have yet to close the gap.