Calls to investigate tax sites for sharing financial information with Meta
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's not like meta was buying up people's tax returns. Just negligence on the part of these tax sites.
And meta and google analytics means there is data exchange, why do they want to do any "analytics" on people's personal data? Remove any and all analytics on tax websites.
Why are you straight up attacking the people by saying "Most people here in the comments clearly didn't read the article". They clearly did, understand and have full right to ask questions.
> Why are you straight up attacking the people by saying "Most people here in the comments clearly didn't read the article". They clearly did, understand and have full right to ask questions.
At the time I wrote this comment, most people had clearly not read the article. Currently it still seems like a huge number of people still haven't since they're talking about things like the sale of tax information to meta, or why meta would want your tax information. There was no sale, meta likely didn't even know they had this information. It was just negligence. That's not attacking people, it's calling a spade a spade, which I will do without trepidation or remorse.
Maybe, maybe not. I think it merits investigation. Even if this was accidental I think it is still criminal negligence and should be prosecuted.
This doesn't matter. If I did the same with your medical records HIPAA wouldn't give two shits. I improperly secured data, end of story. Even then you're depending on Meta telling us the truth (Of course I didn't look at that data, signed Mark). And even then you're depending on that data remaining secure and not getting piped off somewhere else.
Really ought to remove Corporate Analytic Software from all sites.
Is there an open-source alternative to handing over your entire site and all your users to the Big Two?
Meta and the rest are at fault for using the data they gather from these analytics for their own purposes.
This is not a new problem, and is why I block analytics scripts and data connections to Meta/Google/etc.
I agree, but that's not something that's going to happen. What do site operators care? They aren't the ones paying the price.
So the practical result is that we have to protect ourselves from the web sites. I do this by blocking domains that belong to analytics providers, and don't allow most Javascript to execute in my browser.
That data came to Meta through its Pixel code, which the tax firms installed on their websites to gather information on how to improve their own marketing campaigns. In exchange, Meta was able to access the data to write targeted algorithms for its own users.
https://apnews.com/article/irs-taxpayer-tax-preparation-meta...
Looks like very much more than "just negligence". Looks like deliberate private data usage without the consent of the people involved.
I realize this article doesn't match turbotax specifically but the entire industry is rotten to the core and shouldn't exist in the first place.
I get what you're saying, but is there a reason you don't download the PDF and store it in your own records?
What the heck did these companies become!?
They collected and profited off the data. If you're building and optimizing tools being used by criminals, you bear some culpability.
The default behaviour of these pixels is (or was) to gobble up every bit of data on the page, including the values of all form fields. However, this was _not_ common knowledge at the time and certainly not communicated when implementing a pixel.
It was negligence that lead to this data being leaked, but the silent default behaviour of tracking all form values is insane. Most people would opt out if given the option up-front, so the fact this was silently enabled by default and hidden away until you actively looked for it at least partially shifts the blame to Meta. They obviously knew what they were doing.
Tax-filing websites have been sending users financial info to Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33753058 - Nov 2022 (20 comments)
Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705532 - Nov 2022 (74 comments)
Are they actually sharing any financial information, or are they just passing a counter back to Meta saying that person X filled out a form/visited a page.
Not to say any tracking is 'good' but this might not be quite so obviously bad.
Regardless of the details it's an area that needs A LOT more regulatory scrutiny.
And just look at the docs if you want to find out what pixel exactly does: it doesn't collect form data unless the developer explicitly specifies it.
clicking off switch in AI enabled application at Meta that does exactly that
1. Data sold to Natsec/FBI/CIA/NSA etc
2. Data sold to IRS
3. Data sold to state tax authority
4. Data sold to police agencies
5. Data sold to *churches* ( https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/catholic-group-buying-data-to-out-gay-priests )
... to bastardize Cardinal Richelieu's quote
Every company running ads on the internet is making this value exchange, but these financial companies screwed up by pouring protected data into Google's and Meta's dumb pipes.
It seems like we have a name for such transaction. Where one party gives something to get something else from second party.
It's called sale. Not sharing.
We also have words for one party giving something that doesn't belong to them, or which they are not entitled to give. They're somewhere between embezzlement and theft.
When its information that can be copied it would usually be called sharing (because both parties still have what they started with, but both have 'more' as they have shared with the other).
If you are arguing semantics, sale is probably the wrong term and 'sharing' is probably more accurate.
I thought the definition of "sale" is the exchange of a thing for consideration. The consideration is usually money, but doesn't have to be.
But I had to look it up. My definition was a bit too expansive, but not by much. The first one in the American Heritage dictionary is
The exchange of goods or services for
an amount of money or its equivalent;
the act of selling.
I think "sharing" is less accurate. Maximal pedantic accuracy is probably "bartered".
The one that isn't accurate though would be sale, which is an exchange for money.
I would say that despite the casual use of "share" such as in your example, that isn't really "sharing". It's bartering. The use of the car is predicated on getting something in return, so it's an exchange of value.
You are either deliberately making it sound more nefarious than it is or you didn’t read the article.
I’m happy to see this getting visibility around a privacy use case that’ll reach normal folks and politicians more clearly.
I’m also happy to see the “this is bad” comments far outnumbering the “well why is this Metoogle’s fault” comments that many (properly RSU’d incentivized) engineers always seem to fall back on to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the social impacts of the products they build and personally profit from.
Don't these companies receive money to host the pixels?
Didn't these companies actually sell user data?
"Giving" and "sharing" are not the same as "selling", yet not one article I've read indicated whether the tax prep compaies received payment for the user data.
Does anyone know?
https://www.freetaxusa.com/privacy
But they are not one of the majors.
Peeking at your credit cards purchase historic I can understand, as it tells them your shopping habits and helps them target you better. But tax data?? Why??
The more they know the better of a profile they can build about you which is something they can sell. It's surveillance capitalism, plain and simple.
E.g. if the tax return companies install Hotjar and it starts sending screenshots of tax returns to Hotjar servers, that's not Hotjar trying to grab tax returns.
I can also imagine specific ads targeted at small business owners, or landlords. Either of those are easy to parse (imprecisely) by the presence of specific forms in the return.
But also think about combining it with all the other data they have? They can sell that to anyone even the government. So you know how govt agencies can't just go peek at your taxes without a good reason? Google and meta can sell this data to contractors to sleuth on people or do whatever they do because it's technically all private industry.
Any peice of data like this is super lucrative.
I am currently running an experiment where I have put about 3.5 million USD in a Google Finance portfolio not marked "playground" to see what shakes out of it.
I suspect I will find out soon.
I wouldn't expect anyone at Meta to actually look at unencrypted user pixel payloads. Seems like an easy way to lose your job.
That said, there doesn't need to be semantic value for this to feed into an ML model that ends up associating tax data attributes with other attributes.
Tax land. Land is not capital nor is it labor. Land ownership only allows rent-seeking behavoir. Land ownership is an artificial right granted by the government.
Google "single tax movement" to learn more. Or try this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
i'm only ok with this if we restrict voting rights to land owners
You also seem to be surprised that your ownership of land is a right granted by the government. Go ask your favorite law school professor about this, they will confirm that I am right.
Historically all land belonged to the sovereign. The US didn't like the idea of kings, so under our common law all land belongs to the US government.
And you get your rights to your piece of it because the law recognizes that you should have and deserve to have monopoly rights.
But if it wasn't fundamentally the property of the US federal government, where would the government get the legal jurisdiction to enforce the monopoly rights it has granted you? The US government will not enforce any property rights you may think you have in Mexico.
See, I'm not questioning private property, I want you to be able to own land. I'm looking at it in its proper full legal context.
Now you want to restrict voting rights to land owners, probably thinking some variant of "no taxation without representation", right? But recall that the fundamental owner is "we the people", not "we the individual to whom the people have granted a monopolistic usage of what we the people own".
So yes, since every citizen is in fact the land owner, then the single tax principle by default meets your criteria of restricting voting rights to land owners.
And since I've met your criteria, welcome to the movement. We are glad you are here.
that's something that can easily be used as the basis for enslavement
Imagine if income tax was not automatically deducted from your paycheck, but required you to save and physically send money to the IRS (like most 1099 contractors have to do). I think the overall feeling about tax for the bottom 60% of earners would be a little different, whereas now they see getting back some forced savings as a little reward.
The government is highly incentivized to automate and disguise that activity further.
"Current Tax Payment Act of 1943" https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/191355
There are also very simple tax systems that are not regressive, like the UK or most of Europe's systems. Just eliminate most deductions and the ones you keep, decouple from taxes. Then 90% of employees can just have their tax deducted at source and not file anything. Like the UK and European systems. All of the big ones are just automated in most places (here in the UK, investment income is taxed at source, allowances for kids are done automatically based on birth record and the tax authority automatically tell employers rates including for those with multiple jobs)
I can't comment on the exact details of the German tax system.
Here in the UK, I've done 4 tax returns in 22 years of working. All were because I was contracting via a limited company so there was no other way for HMRC to know what was earning.
What was the complexity around the German system? I understand they are federal (with state as well as local and federal taxes)...
Maybe the sales tax would be zero rate for uncooked food at grocery stores.
If W2 withholding was removed, people who have more take home pay then go into debt when taxes were due.
My grandmother was a walking collection of proverbs and one of the more pointy ones was 'the devil always shits on the larger heap'. I'm not sure if the meaning comes across in English but the gist is that once you're wealthy more wealth is pretty much guaranteed whereas the poor just get poorer.
Removing loopholes, reducing the kinds of things that can be claimed without solid proof (or likelihood of needing to be proved, or complicated to prove), reducing the amount of paperwork that can create loopholes, etc. is part of simplifying.
Removing personal deductions, a simple 1-step calculation, is not simplifying.
And reducing tax rates is not necessary to simplify taxes. A graduated income tax is very simple.
Think about it harder. Don't be intellectually lazy and just jump to cutting certain taxes because it would be "simpler". Unless that's your goal.
When did I suggest lower taxes? I suggested sales tax increase which would offset removal of personal income tax.
If you're poor you're paying a high percentage of your income on this sales tax.
If you're not poor a much smaller percentage will be towards sales tax.
Rich people have investments and that is not income for tax purposes if it is correctly set up. For many rich, they have escaped from W2 taxes on income. "Income" according to the personal income tax code of IRS.
Poor working people, and middle class, have IRS income. The rich have investments and trusts and LLCs and loopholes.
Capital gains on investments are taxable as well, although some people can defer paying capital gains taxes simply by not selling until they need to. That does not avoid taxes, but rather defer them until later.
If anything "the rich" are subject to additional taxes, notably estate taxes. Irrevocable trusts can be used to reduce estate taxes, but do not reduce income taxes except by having a different person (the trust beneficiary) pay taxes on trust income.
That is currently the legal responsibility of the financial institutions (for payments over a certain amount), not the ACH network. The ACH system doesn't have information like SSNs or EINs to associate with individual payments.
Does FedNow have a plan to start gathering and requiring that information from depository financial institutions just to do a simple bank transfer?
That's not to say it wouldn't be impossible to automate our taxes, but we'd probably want to tweak quite a few things in the tax code if we wanted to make automatic filing work without either being onerous or inaccurate.
A very significant number of people take the standard deduction and only include data in their return that has already been provided to the government by their employer and perhaps their brokerage and retirement management firms.
But that wouldn't be a system that would be ...
> the end of the story for those of us not running a business.
as claimed above
Taxes in the US are not objective. The IRS doesn't have enough information about you to determine how much you need to pay.
If you are imagining W2 workers with no business activity, children, inheritance, donations, property, or investments, I think this is actually a tiny portion.
[0] https://neotax.eu/en/blog/tax-classes-steuerklassen-in-germa...
Instead they could just send you "This is what we calculated" and you can do nothing (probably 90% of people) or file as we do today for the special cases you mentioned.
Please explain. Which percentage of the year did the child live at each household? Is the property your primary residence? Did you rent a room? What amount did you spend on property upkeep or interest?
Heck, nearly 90% of households take the standard deduction.
The IRS should send a pre-filled form with an amount owed (in either direction). If you agree, you sign it, and make any payment/refund. If you disagree, you add your deductions and whatever else needed, similar to today.
Don't these companies receive money to host the pixels?
Didn't these companies actually sell user data?
"Giving" and "sharing" are not the same as "selling", yet not one article I've read indicated whether the tax prep compaies received payment for the user data.
Does anyone know?
A generous explanation is that the tax sites were inadvertently offering up this data as a result of the whole analytics buy-in. But you would expect a site dealing with tax info would not be that stupid/naive to allow 3rd party code on their sites without knowing exactly what the repercussions of that are.
I could just be blowing smoke out of my ass though.
...a spokesperson for Ramsey Solutions, said in an email that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience.”
“We did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel,”
Of course, "a more personalized customer experience". Well duh, everybody needs that!
"the whole analytics buy-in" is really the issue isn't it?
The internet giants are making billions in a surveillance economy, that in the US is a blatant violation of the constitution's 4th amendment. But, nobody really cares about that do they? Well, except the 2nd amendment, because if we aren't armed to the teeth the libtards are coming to take away our burgers!
We do live in interesting times...
This is not the first time they (Meta et all) were caught with their hands in the cookie jar and still, over 100 million people thought it's a good idea to give them even more access to their information.
It's sad and disheartening to realise, again and again, that the "regular" user couldn't care less. And based on the downvotes I received, neither do the hn users. Besides some imaginary internet points, more importantly, I'm loosing faith we will ever open our eyes and see the cancer that are these data stealing corporations. </rant>
Could very well be, that's why I prefaced it with "off-topic".
> If anyone cares about their data privacy I would expect HN users to be on the frontlines.
There's a saying/cliché/myth: expectations (can) lead to disappointment
If by selling we refer strictly to "exchanged data for money", then no, based on the Senate report there is not direct evidence of that.
Based on the same report though, the tax sites had business agreements with Facebook to include the pixel and, again, even if they didn't receive any money per-se for that inclusion, they certainly benefited from it (via Lookalike Audience and generally, improved ad targeting).
So, does Facebook (and Google etc) sell your data? One can argue that technically they don't. Are they making a profit from having (and using) that data? I'll let you answer this question.
> How Threads’ Privacy Policy Compares to Twitter’s (and Its Rivals’)
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-twitter-threads-bluesky-spi...