Professors write recommendation letters for their former students. We do so voluntarily and without compensation. We also do so with few complaints - even when the student contacts you days before the application deadline.
If I am writing a serious recommendation letter - one that, if the admissions officers read it, helps the student, rather than a generic one that reads like every other, it takes hours of time. Any long-serving professor has had thousands of former students. Remembering who the reference requester is is the first challenge. Understanding what program the student is applying to, and what s/he intends to do with the degree is the next challenge.
Recently, I was getting ready to upload a letter I wrote for a former student. I clicked on the link sent to me by the school, and landed on a third-party website. This company has decided to turn reference letters into a data business and I am asked to accept the following conditions:
This is the typical forced-consent tactic we're all familiar with. It's the type of notice you get from Facebook or Gmail - which they justify by offering you a "free" service. That was eons ago. Forced consent is now being imposed by companies that charge you to use their services: Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, etc. are not free services, and yet they are monetizing our personal data, regardless. Companies that turn off the ads if you subscribe do not turn off the data collection, either.
Which brings me back to recommendation writing. I'm offering free help to a former student, and for doing that, I am forced to become the subject of data collection. I give them credit for being upfront about this - not just linking to an inscrutable Privacy Policy but also highlighting some of the terms I'm agreeing to. They directly admit that my personal information will be harvested and stored. They say they will delete or anonymize the data after they deem it unnecessary, except as stated, the data can be considered necessary indefinitely.
They explicitly disclose that they will scrape data about me from other sources (there is no such thing as "receiving" data, as data don't randomly present themselves to one's door) and merge the datasets. This might happen if they place a cookie (or cookie-like object) on my browser when I upload the reference letter. If they then collaborate with other websites (think Facebook Like button, which is everywhere), then they can track my web browsing thereafter.
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