Tax return is secret by law. TurboTax wants you to give up your privacy | Hacker News Reader

Tax return is secret by law. TurboTax wants you to give up your privacy

washingtonpost.com

77 pointswolverine87622 comments

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You have to give up your privacy to even login to IRS.gov because to use ID.me one must:

* Consent to the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information to third parties (i.e. data brokers).

* Agree to binding arbitration and a waiver of class action rights.

* Agree to limits on liability for any indirect, punitive, special, exemplary, incidental, or consequential damages.

* Consent to arbitrary termination of the account at any time for any reason.

More context:

https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2023-10/20...

https://www.id.me/privacy

https://www.id.me/terms

https://archive.ph/E0XbU

90% of the article is a nothing burger about the usual asking for data for advertising. (Guess who also does that? WaPo)

The only interesting bit is the very last screenshot where they mix your officials filing signature with the unrelated consent button for data sharing, using non-grammar to hide the meaning of the button. This is not informed consent and so the advertising data use is illegal. Intuit is a criminal organization.

TurboTax is littered with a number of dark patterns. Constantly using fear to upsell to another product. Misdirection.

But their bribes are paid up, so they'll suffer no penalty.

Quickbooks is a goddamn tragedy, yet people buy it every day. The user front end isn't bad, but what kind of morons can't write updates that work reliably? I'll tell you who, its the very same morons at Intuit!

Source: Entirely too many years chasing bullshit because Intuit cannot write fucking updates to save their lives and have zero shits to give about it.

The WaPo does not ask for access to your tax return data

They buy (ad targeting against it) from Intuit.

Asking to give fliers to wealthy people is still very different from asking for other people’s personal finance information.

Tax info is more or less public in many Nordic countries. It helps to create a more equal society.

In Norway at least you do have to give up your own info to look up someone else’s info. A pretty good check on the ability IMO

Curious if one could participate in good faith once, then impersonate from that point forward

Surely it could be untangled

Couldn't people with means just pay someone else to do the lookup for them?

Im not Norwegian but perhaps someone from Norway can respond. Is there a cottage industry for this?

Tax returns shouldn't be private at all. Nordic countries make them public and this keeps people honest.

By all means, try living in one of the numerous countries in the world where graft, extortion and outright criminal kidnapping of you and your family members are common occurrences and then declare that tax returns shouldn't be private or that financial privacy isn't more than just a silly little fixation.

Aside from very good arguments for why people deserve financial privacy as much as many other types of privacy for all kinds of philosophical reasons, there are also very practical, life and property-protecting reasons for why any abrogation of this type of privacy should be very, very carefully qualified and measured before being applied.

Also try remembering the other 99+% of the world's population that doesn't live in your Nordic paradise and won't live in anything like it for a long time to come. Their circumstances aren't something you can indulgently apply your ideas of what's "correct" so easily just because you think it works in a very small part of the world that has unusual conditions in its favor.

Some people on this site truly seem to live in bubbles of armored plexiglass when it comes to resisting flexible thinking or wider considerations about anything different from what they experience. It's almost amusing.

Privacy is important to protect people's liberty and is important in itself. I don't think it's worth throwing away. Lots of intimate information is on and can be derived from tax returns.

I disagree. It works in the Nordic countries. I haven't heard anyone from there bitching about it.

Millionaires and billionaires everywhere, and their groupies, are clutching their pearls right now!

This ought to be illegal.

I'm sure it is, but when they get fined 15 bucks, do you think they'll be dissuaded? In fact, they will embolden more to do the same, since the consequence is literally profits that outweigh the bullshit speed ticket level of fine.

Actually it would be for the best if every tax return was public information

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