Security News > 2022 > April > Facebook's Meta, tracking code, and the student financial aid website

Meta's Facebook subsidiary has been collecting hashed personal data from students seeking US government financial aid, even from those without a Facebook account and those not logged into the student aid website, according to a research study published this week.

News non-profit The Markup, working with Mozilla via its Rally data monitoring extension, found that the Meta pixel code has been gathering digital fingerprints representing the first name, last name, phone number, zip code, and email address of students filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, on the US Department of Education's StudentAid.

"Federal Student Aid works hard to protect the privacy and security of customer data for those who visit our our StudentAid.gov website," Federal Student Aid chief operating officer Richard Cordray told The Register.

The Meta pixel consists of JavaScript code publishers add to their web pages for tracking ad conversions, usage analytics, and other data collection.

Meta's tracker can tell Facebook who visited a page - based on existing cookies - and other information - HTTP headers, including IP address, Pixel ID, Facebook Cookie, clicked buttons and their labels, data set by developers and marketers, and web form field name.

Elsewhere in data harvesting, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and an unaffiliated colleague have plumbed the privacy practices of Meta's Oculus VR platform and found that associated VR apps also collect a large amount of data with inadequate disclosure.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/04/30/meta_student_data/