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Donate. slash donate. The Facebook tool that's tracking kids from kindergarten to college.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. For years Facebook and Instagram parent Meta has offered a code called

Pixel to businesses.

By embedding Pixel on their websites, those businesses can collect information on users,

then target them with ads on Meta's social media platforms.

The investigative news website, The Mark Up, has been

looking into how along the way some of the personal information Pixel gathers gets

shared back with the tech giant. Meta says its policies make clear advertisers should not send sensitive information about customers through its business tools,

but Colin Letcher, co-author of a new markup investigation, is now reporting that students are among

those the Pixel Code tracks.

These pixels are on millions of websites and we've been kind of investigating for the past year what these

websites are so we found it on tax filing websites we found it on hospital

websites most recently we took a look at education related websites, right?

So we found that a lot of places where students regularly visit,

for example, the official ACT website or a bunch of learning educational

websites for younger kids were using the pixel and sending some potentially

sensitive information to Meta through it. Yeah and at the top of your piece you give this example of a hypothetical high school

student and you kind of track some of the ways that she might be touched by this pixel tracking code.

...