Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing

by dannykwells • 4 years ago

280 57 4 years ago

nerdjon2• 4 years ago

I hate this situation so much.

I can block a lot with my browser but then often websites stop working, so while that is a solution since I have the technical knowledge to handle it there is no way in hell I am going to tell my parents to install something that will block this stuff.

Throw in the tracking in apps and potential server side tracking that there is nothing I can do about.

We need some serious laws to be implemented. I have removed Facebook and google as much out of my life as possible, but they still collect data about me without my consent and it is very frustrating.

I despise that other people can consent to have my data given to these companies (by my data being on their devices as my phone number, texts, whatever) and then these companies can consent for me to have my data sent just by going to their website.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 4 years ago

Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent.

The issue, however, is simple. There is real money on the table so anyone even thinking of running ( and making a change ) must be able to withstand likely quick and solid stomp, must be techy enough to understand the risks and PRy enough to be able to move in today's media landscape. Those skills tend of be somewhat rare on their own. Combination of those traits is likely more rare.

<< Throw in the tracking in apps and potential server side tracking that there is nothing I can do about.

And after that, almost inevitable hacks ( inevitable due to misaligned incentives for companies ).

nerdjon2• 4 years ago

Regarding your last part, it is true that hacks are a serious concern. I guess I just can't bring myself to think about that (for this data) since I already feel powerless. Plus these companies are already doing stuff with my data that I don't want so how much worse could hackers be? (I know seriously much worse but for me there is not much difference between Facebook/google having this data and hackers... I still did not consent to it).

I agree on people running. I have been saying for several years that if a candidate came out and said "I don't have a strong technical understanding of [insert important technical discussion], but here are the people I will keep personally employed to help me with that to answer that question" will mean a lot to me. But I also know that admitting you don't know something will be picked up by the media and they will be destroyed for saying that, even though in admitting it is really a great sign.

Many of the people in power may have people that can explain it, but they will never truly understand it. Especially when they have so many other things they also have to deal with.

moolcool• 4 years ago

Even if you could somehow guarantee that there will never be hacks, I'd say that the very existence of this data is almost exclusively to the detriment of the "consumer". If, for example, one of the anti-abortion states wanted to subpoena Meta for location data of all of its residents who flew out of state to visit an abortion clinic, they easily could. If an insurance company wanted to partner with Google to see if you're getting your 10k steps every day, or speeding in your car, and adjust your rates accordingly, they easily could. We're living in a dogshit digital panopticon, and we need to take laws to reign this in extremely seriously.

randomdata3• 4 years ago

Those are the kinds of moments I wish I had some charisma and run for an office myself, because I genuinely feel I lack any kind of real representation as a constituent.

If you won you'd still be beholden to the constituents as their representative, and seeing as how they, as a whole, do not align with your personal position, you're not going to be any further ahead. At least not without moving to a new constituency where the people are more likely to align – which is something you can also do as a constituent.

taylodl2• 4 years ago

Serious laws have been implemented in the countries we bemoan for being "socialist." This is free market capitalism doing its thing. Just remember this when you hear the libertarians blather on about government and how the market will sort this all out. Uh-huh.

FpUser• 4 years ago

"This is free market capitalism doing its thing."

This "free capitalism" does not mind when Government protects their copyright, patents etc. etc. They should not mind Government protecting us either. Otherwise let's get even and remove their protections. Then see how they like it.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

Without the socialist government robbing you through taxes there would be no need for the "tax websites" so there would be nothing to send to facebook.

makestuff• 4 years ago

At the very least I should get paid for my data. If I steal a patent that google has you better believe I am going to be paying up, but they can collect my personal data (or my personal intellectual property for lack of a better term) and not pay me a dime for it. I get if you are using their services for free then that kind of makes sense, but if you are not using any of their services why in the hell should they be able to act like the NSA.

texasbigdata• 4 years ago

The worse is the payroll companies leaking to equifax. In some states you can “disclose” car loan data on consumers to a certain extent, mortgage balances, etc.

Each one alone is troublesome and when aggregated it’s super annoying every American can basically be a voyeur target for a few dollars, and not even have to option to consent to this happening.

mindslight4• 4 years ago

No, this is not what you want - because the straightforward outcome would be that your personal data was declared to be worth $X, which you were compensated for and then traded away as consideration to use the service. So then the service has an ongoing license to your data, which they sublicense to Facebook, and absolutely nothing changes besides legally cementing their surveillance regime. What we need is the definition of consent ala the GDPR that does not allow personal information to be permanently bought but only temporarily licensed with the requirement of ongoing consent that can be withdrawn at any time.

matheusmoreira• 4 years ago

They should not be allowed to collect any data even if they offer their services for free. Personal information is not a currency. We are not cattle to be sold to advertisers.

otikik• 4 years ago

I don’t even want to be paid. Let me see it! It could be useful to me. Also, let me change it. I am not as interested in gambling as YouTube seems to think.

cbtacy• 4 years ago

they suck. no question. all you can do is blackhole all facebook domains in your /etc/hosts file.

Calvin02• 4 years ago

Wouldn't a more effective strategy be to put pressure on tax companies to stop using this data for advertising? Which, I guess, is what the article is trying to do.

m463• 4 years ago

You shouldn't call it "advertising". That term seems benign.

"advertising" makes people think it will be used to sell them sweaters in a pop up ad, but it can be easily used to deny access to housing, jobs or loans.

MichaelCollins• 4 years ago

The US government isn't going to stop this shit anytime soon, since it was their idea in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".[1]
The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004 (one day before the launching of Facebook),

If you live in any other country, you should lobby your government to ban Facebook, to ban all foreign social media entirely. But I fear the situation is hopeless for us Americans.

andrewstuart2• 4 years ago

"The government" is hardly a single organism with a unified will. So I wouldn't expect one organization doing or proposing an idea would mean the rest of the government organizations would just be like "oh dang they're right, it was our idea, better not touch it."

javajosh• 4 years ago

Its an interesting concept, and it keeps being reinvented over the years. Sometimes people even dump their measurements into the public domain, often via an HN post!

There is a nice symmetry here, too, in that such a tool could be a force for great good, but it could also be used as a force for great evil. Such a tool would give "you" (the thinking, rational, speaking you) a great deal of leverage over the behavior of your future self using the same techniques honed by Tik Tok, Facebook and Twitter. It would give you a great deal of awareness and control over your Situation, to assess and minimize risk. (The application to opportunity is harder to imagine than risk, but I'm sure it's there, too.)

Certainly there's nothing physically impossible about such a system ultimately being under your personal control, with an ur-5th amendment protection against intrusion, and civilizational infrastructure to guard against intentional and unintentional hw and sw flaws that subvert that protection guarantee. But all of that would require a real and dangerous commitment to individual autonomy and responsibility on par with the 2nd Amendment. Do the risks of making bad people more effective outweigh the benefit of making everyone more effective? How does that tradeoff compare with a similar tradeoff around the 2nd Amendment?

datavirtue4• 4 years ago

So Facebook was their project? Not surprised.

TaylorAlexander• 4 years ago

I just watched the first four Die Hard movies and it’s amazing how much it changed in Die Hard 4, which came out after 9/11.

In the first three movies, the bad guys are basically after money, the cops are all disorganized fools, and it’s just this one guy with the right skills that foils the plot.

In the fourth movie, the bad guys are after your whole country, your freedom, and your daughter, the cops are supported by the feds who are are very cool and powerful, and the feds from their all-seeing command center masterfully assist the guy with skills to foil the bad guys. Also the bad guys can log in to any webcam they want any control any computer system at the press of a button.

Watching this reminded me of the mass cultural delusion that took over USA in the 2000’s. This LifeLog program follows from the idea that anything and everything that can be done to foil a potentially all powerful adversary should be done, and things like individual privacy have no meaning whatsoever.

What’s interesting looking back at these movies, knowing for example how the cops behaved at the Uvalde elementary school shooting, is that the portrayal of the police in the first three movies is way more accurate than the fourth.

sphars• 4 years ago

The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts

The investigators on this have included some of the data they saw being shared that you can see at their GitHub[0]

[0] https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes

mindslight4• 4 years ago

So much web software shamelessly includes malware. When you need proprietary software to do anything sensitive, a better approach is to pirate an installable software package, install and fully update it, make sure it works, kill the VM's Internet access and never reenable it, and communicate only via Samba on the local network. This takes care of OS, developer, and distributor malware in one fell swoop.

(I agree with another comment saying we need privacy legislation that would stop this sort of thing, but in the mean time the only thing you can change is yourself)

mistrial9• 4 years ago

hah! - this is getting downvotes and yet there is some truth in it. Anyone with experience over time has seen the erosion of privacy and repeated data leaks from consumer-facing companies.. in the case of tax preparation software, leaking explicitly private and sensitive financial details with names and unique identifying information, directly.

What choice is there when commercial companies push user-hostile and perhaps directly illegal leaks like this?

I will not advocate software piracy on a sealed VM like the pp here, but please consider the skill, time and effort it takes to write acceptable consumer software, as a direct barrier to entry for "fair" players, and then add network effects.. With that, consider the personal productivity software that has been built slowly and well over two decades in an open way.. where the user of the software has the right and ability to examine, modify and use the code.

I predict that intrusion and forced-interference into tax transactions will increase over time in almost every jurisdiction around the world. There really is no better time than now to re-examine your own practices with software on the open net.

mindslight4• 4 years ago

You could pay for the software and do the same thing. But if you still have to spend so much effort making sure the publisher isn't attacking you, what obligation do you have? It's a low trust economy and thus law of the jungle. A privacy law akin to the GDPR could increase the level of trust and support straightforwardly participating in that economy. All we have right now is the dumpster fire drumbeat of whichever companies were found abusing their users this week, with vanishingly small reason to not keep doing it once they're out of the limelight.

benjaminbachman• 4 years ago

"If you aren't the customer, you're the product" apparently is a lie. You're the product no matter what. Unless I missed it in the article, I doubt paying $100 for the advanced tax prep excluded me from this.

inkcapmushroom• 4 years ago

No way the companies whose job is to find loopholes to save a couple bucks would leave that money on the table.

arrosenberg• 4 years ago

You are Facebook's product and TaxAct's potential customer. TaxAct is sending that data so they can ad-target you to sell you tax software.

snowpid3• 4 years ago

It is important to say, and it is simply not mentioned, that this problem is an American problem.

xnorswap• 4 years ago

These problems while not uniquely American, are certainly made worse by the US attitude to both data privacy and tax returns.

snowpid3• 4 years ago

Could you give examples from countries with similar problems?

sys_647382• 4 years ago

Hopefully Facebook will self-implode with Zuck's Metaverse taking the whole org with it. Call your Congress person and ask them if they're being sponsored by the likes of FB or these tax webpages. Then ask them to stand up for your consumer rights.

postalrat• 4 years ago

Out with facebook, in with tiktok.

sys_647382• 4 years ago

You're not wrong that something will always fill the void left.

perfectstorm• 4 years ago

someone else will replace them and have their own version of FB pixel. government needs to put a stop to these shady practices but that's too much work, isn't it? who is going fund their next election campaign if they act tough.

Meanwhile the US government is spending $15 million (https://www.propublica.org/article/files-taxes-free-inflatio...) to study free tax filing. the keyword is study, not implement.

datavirtue4• 4 years ago

Of course! Why not?

donutshop• 4 years ago

Could anyone comment on simpletax?

kova12• 4 years ago

What. The. Fuck.

Tax is arguably on the same level of confidently as health data, and companies entrusted with this information just sells it off?

Tax was supposed about giving government your money. There wasn't supposed to be private information disclosed as a result of filling taxes. This is beyond outrageous

What. The. Fuck...

xorcist• 4 years ago

"Tax filing websites" is a strange invention. Tax should be filled with the tax office.

Involving third parties in the process can only make things more complex. Even if that market should grow and attract entrepreneurs it's all artificial rent seeking, and not positive for the economy at large.

fuzzy2• 4 years ago

Allow me to present the strangest thing then: A tax filing website – made by the tax office! Such a thing exists, in Germany, aptly named „Elster“ (magpie).

0cf8612b2e1e• 4 years ago

Will add this to the long list of reasons why Facebook employees should not act indignant when the public assumes the worst from their employer.

Animats• 4 years ago

What happens if you send MetaPixel a CCPA demand?

yumraj• 4 years ago

FB lays off 11,000 people.

I overcome my hate for FB and feel a little bit of sympathy for these people, might even want to hire a few if/when situation presents itself.

Then I read this, I’m reminded of what FB is and who all created this system, all sympathy vanishes.

musicale• 4 years ago

Because of course they have.

That being said, credit bureaus and data brokers seem just as bad as Facebook, just less visible.

Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook

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