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A new federal lawsuit, scheduled to be filed as soon as today, accuses the Department of Education of failing to disclose records of its correspondence with Facebook, after an investigation by The Markup found the department sharing sensitive student information with the tech company. 

In 2022, The Markup revealed how the department used a tool called the Meta Pixel to quietly gather names, email addresses, and zip codes of prospective college students who filled out the online Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The pixel transmitted the student data from the FAFSA website, the primary way millions of students and their families apply for financial aid, to Facebook and its parent company, Meta, in a “hashed” or scrambled format that could be easily reversed and potentially used by Meta for targeting advertisements.  

After The Markup alerted the U.S. Department of the tracking practice, the agency stopped using the pixel on the FAFSA and said that an advertising campaign had “inadvertently” tracked unintended data on applicants and would review the issue. But questions remain about how the student data might have been used, or how many people might have been affected. Facebook’s algorithms are complex, and even some engineers at the company have complained that they don’t understand where data the company receives ends up. 

Almost immediately following The Markup’s investigation, the nonprofit organizations National Student Legal Defense Network (Student Defense), which provides legal defense for higher education students, and Accountable Tech, which advocates against online surveillance practices, asked lawmakers to investigate the trackers on the FAFSA website, and requested documents from the Department of Education under the Freedom of Information Act. The groups asked the Department of Education to provide any communications between government officials and Facebook. Their request also asked for any reports or other documents about data being sent to the company through the Meta Pixel.

Today, the organizations allege in a lawsuit that, more than two years later, they still have not received records from the Department of Education, and are asking the court to force the agency to provide the documents.

Aaron Ament, president of Student Defense, told The Markup that the organizations wanted to learn more about what Facebook did with the students’ information, and whether the department investigated the incident. “I think there’s some real concerns around what’s happening with this data,” Ament said. “Especially if students just went to the government’s website to fill out a FAFSA and their data is sent, what has happened since then?” 

He points out that large, for-profit higher education institutions have used Facebook ads to reach students through pressure tactics in the past. Despite promises, those colleges may leave students debt-ridden and with inflated expectations about finding a job. Ament said the organizations were concerned about whether students could be targeted by such schools through the data. 

Meta and the Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on the suit or for more information on how the students’ data was used. 

The Pixel Hunt

Meta offers the pixel free to businesses and organizations to embed on their websites and track visitors. By using the tool, companies can gather data about users’ interest and later advertise to them on Facebook. If a pixel detects that a person is browsing watches, for example, a business might purchase Facebook ads to show them other timepieces they might be interested in. The tool is one of the reasons internet users complain about online shopping items haunting them across the web. 

While businesses can target ads to their customers using the pixel, it’s also a boon to Facebook. The tool entices businesses to spend more on ad campaigns, and Facebook can also use the data it receives to improve its own internal advertising algorithms. 

Millions of websites use the Meta Pixel, according to the company, but most people never know when they interact with one. To understand the pervasiveness of the code, The Markup launched a project called The Pixel Hunt. Working with Mozilla Rally, we gathered anonymized browsing data from volunteers that showed their interactions with the pixel, and also directly examined network traffic between Facebook and the websites themselves.

The project has revealed the surprising ways data from sensitive industries is provided to Facebook without users’ knowledge. The Markup’s stories have uncovered examples of hospitals, tax preparation companies, and mortgage lenders sharing customers’ personal data with Facebook, along with other instances of websites tracking students. 

Those investigations have resulted in many businesses removing the pixels, as well as dozens of privacy-related lawsuits and scrutiny from Congressional lawmakers, including in response to The Markup’s FAFSA investigation. 

Calls for accountability rolled in almost immediately after publication. Two Congressional Republicans, in a 2022 letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, called the tracking “completely inappropriate” and “predatory.” The two North Carolina lawmakers, Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Virginia Foxx, said they had requested a briefing from Cardona on the issue but had been rebuffed. 

Ament said there are “members of Congress that are really interested on both sides of the aisle” on how the data might have been used.

“There’s been a lot of questions since your article that really haven’t gotten answered,” he said.