"This Is Appalling": Major Tax Filing Services Have Been Sending Financial Information To Facebook
"This Is Appalling": Major Tax Filing Services Have Been Sending Financial Information To Facebook
BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, NOV 25, 2022 - 05:30 PM
Major tax filing services, including H&R Block, TaxAct and
TaxSlayer, have been covertly sending Facebook sensitive
financial information when
Americans file their taxes online, according to The Markup.
The data includes names, email addresses,
income, filing status, refund amounts and college scholarship information -
which is sent to Facebook regardless of whether a person even has a Facebook
account - or with other platforms owned by Meta. The company can then be used
to fine tune advertising algorithms.
It is sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel.
Of note, Intuit-owned TurboTax does use Meta Pixel,
however the company did not send financial information - just usernames and the
last time a device signed in. Beyond that, they have kept Pixel entirely off
pages beyond sign in.
Each
year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual
returns filed electronically, and some
of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The
Markup found.
When
users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example,
they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns,
including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of
that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross
income, and the amount of their refund, according
to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and
refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel
also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally
reversible, format. -The Markup
TaxAct, which
services around three million "consumer and professional users," also
sends data to Google via the company's analytics tool, however names are not
included in the information.
"We
take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously," said TaxAct
spokeswoman Nicole Coburn. "TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with
all IRS regulations."
H&R
Block embedded a pixel on its site that included information on
filers' health savings account usage, dependents' college tuition grants and
expenses. The company similarly claimed in a very boilerplate statement that
they "regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing
commitment to privacy, and will review the information."
While TaxSlayer - which
says it completed 10 million federal and state returns last year - provided
Facebook information on filers as part of the social media giant's
"advanced matching" system which attempts to link information from
people browsing the web to Facebook accounts. The information sent includes phone
numbers and the name of the user filling out the form, as well
as the names of any dependents added to the return. Specific demographic
information was also obscured, but Facebook was still able to link them to
existing profiles.
Another tax filing service, Ramsey Solutions, told The
Markup that the company "implemented the Meta Pixel to
deliver a more personalized customer experience," but that they "did
NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being
collected by Facebook from the Pixel."
"As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer
to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax."
Harvard Law School lecturer and tax law specialist Mandi Matlock
said the findings showed that taxpayers have been "providing some of the
most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited."
"This is appalling,"
she added. "It truly is."
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