I was generally ok about sharing the list, except when it was someone who texted out of the blue, who I hadn’t seen for years, asking nothing but where my twin dds were applying. That was weird. I deflected.
Very few. And when I did get a positive comment, I would often find out that the person who said it had graduated from (or had a family member who graduated from) the college my daughter had chosen. (It’s a big school, with lots of alumni.)
I got LOTS of positive comments, though, on my son’s acceptance and attendance at our flagship state university.
The difference seems to involve prestige and/or money. When I would mention that my daughter was applying to (or later, attending) a school that was both selective and expensive, many people seemed to feel threatened because their families’ situations were different, and for reasons of either qualifications or money, their kids could not go to that school.
I think the money part was more important than the GPA/SAT part of it because I never got negative reactions to my son’s application and acceptance to our flagship state university – not even from people whose kids could not go there because their grades and scores weren’t high enough. Those families knew that if their kids had been accepted at State U, the family could have afforded to send them there. That seemed to be the most important factor.
I use my standard deflection I mentioned earlier…where isn’t she applying? But it took me a while to figure it out. My D is pretty academic and most people know this…so lots of why isn’t she applying to the Ivies? Um because well we don’t want to go broke paying 280K (peeps without college approaching kids don’t realize there aren’t scholarships for good grades etc at Ivies), we only applying mostly to merit aid schools that you elite East Coasters won’t have hear of (mainly my family I am not of EC anymore) etc etc etc…Some sarcasm here of course.
Most of my son’s friends were admitted by November of senior year to state flagship and directionals. So friends were astonished that my son had no idea where he was going. Even during senior soccer night in the fall, seniors were announced along with their college plans! So when January rolled around, his friends were signing up for dorms, and in March they were attending orientation. People really felt sorry for us and started asking, “do you know yet?”. 
Like many of the other responses, we found it easy to tell who was just being polite/curious, and who was being nosy. It was easy to tell people who asked that our pups applied to “you know, pretty much the usual suspects” but when they pressed for more details about what was the top choice, we could honestly tell them that “oh, he/she won’t decide that until all of the acceptances and Financial Aid offers come in” - or even “he/she won’t tell me - of course I know the whole extensive list because we paid the application fees, but they won’t rank them because they don’t want to get hopes up, and they asked me to keep the list confidential blah blah blah”
People who cared about our pups as people were happy with the answers, they understood that this is a really tough process, and they know that a LOT of work goes into it, there is a LOT of pressure, and most of them just wanted to be emotionally supportive to all of us.