SAT/ACT: Tell Your Kids to Give Only Five Data Points

From Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and the Washington Post's Answer Sheet:

If your child takes the SAT or PSAT, is his or her personal information being collected, profiled, licensed and sold?

That is the question that Cheri Kiesecker, Colorado parent and member of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, asks and attempts to answer in the following important post. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy is a national alliance of parents and advocates defending the rights of parents and students to protect their data.

Summary: do NOT let your children answer any questions on the PSAT or SAT other than five obligatory questions: name, grade level, sex, date of birth, and student ID number.

If they've already shared the info you can opt out of the CB disclosing it any further here: https://student.collegeboard.org/student-search-ser…/opt-out

To note, the Trump administration just rolled back data privacy protections for all of us this week:

House Republicans voted Tuesday to repeal a set of landmark privacy protections for Web users, in a sharp pivot away from the Internet policies of the Obama administration.

And it empowers Internet providers to enter the $83 billion market for online advertising, where the ability to collect, store, share and sell consumers' behavioral information is directly linked to companies' bottom line. Proponents of the repeal argue the regulations stifle innovation by forcing Internet providers to abide by unreasonably strict guidelines. But defenders of the privacy rules say they are the only thing preventing broadband companies from spying on their customers and selling that data to the highest bidder.

Broadband companies such as Verizon and Comcast are racing to develop ways to mine and analyze customer information — such as their browsing habits, app usage history, location information and more. The FCC's rules, which were passed in October in what was billed as a rare victory for privacy advocates, had set limits on how Internet providers could use that information, seeking to give consumers more control over the data they generate as they traverse the Web on their smartphones and computers. They were scheduled to go into effect in December 2017.

The new legislative measure would effectively allow providers to access and use a wide range of customer data without seeking their users' explicit consent, much as Google and Facebook do now. It also releases Internet providers from obligations to increase protections of customer information against hackers and thieves.

And it prohibits the nation's top telecom regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, from seeking to restore its privacy regulations in the future.