They didn't share financial information, they used meta and google analytics on their sites, which can leak financial information by showing what page the user was on (e.g. pages specific to certain deductions or benefits.) Most people here in the comments clearly didn't read the article.
It's not like meta was buying up people's tax returns. Just negligence on the part of these tax sites.
Its on tax companies to do the due diligence on the users part to make sure they do not leak any taxpayer information. Its private information!
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.
Analytics is normal practice in any web application. However, using third party analytics in sensitive web applications is a bad idea. It is leaking private information, as you correctly point out.
> 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.
> There was no sale, meta likely didn't even know they had this information.
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.
Meta is not the one at fault here. This is like blaming the garbage collector for you throwing out classified documents. Maybe they looked, maybe they didn't. But it's on you, not them. I mean it is on them too if they took advantage of it, but it's not obvious that's what happened here. It looks like gross negligence on the part of these tax web applications at minimum.
Not complying with the tax prep company’s requests is a bit suspect - we’ll see what happens, but it wouldn’t be impossible that Meta knew they had sensitive data and were taking advantage of it.
Completely false. It absolutely matters a ton. I can block Facebook analytics with client-side tools. I can't do anything about my tax preparer directly sending my tax data to Facebook, and that's a much larger problem.
It says "tracking pixels revealed ... full name, address, and date of birth". If these pixels are that powerful, they can probably reveal income figures too.
There was a point in time where the Facebook pixel by default tracked every event on every form field. So yeah, they absolutely had detailed income figures - the had the whole return.
Negligent sharing is still sharing. There is a lot of negligence in software development and we should be better as an industry. It may be standard practice to hastily integrate software without considering legal compliance, but it shouldn't be.
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.
That is part of the reason they offer these services for free. Number one it's about supporting their ads businesses, but they also use it for other things to further their own objectives. People should stop using these analytics services, they're not even that good.
> People should stop using these analytics services, they're not even that good.
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.
Yet it's impossible for me see my own prior tax returns from a product I already paid for. I can't contact support for help without paying additional money to turbotax.
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 am not sure what they meant about "paying additional money to Turbotax" either. I just checked my account, and I have the ability to download final pdfs of my filled out tax returns for all the prior years I filed with Turbotax. No extra payments needed.
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.
Because these companies have a ton of power, and no individual can stand against that. We have to act collectively, and getting there is slow and difficult process.
I would be curious to know what data they're sharing exactly.
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.
Not a bad assumption to be fair. Even if they don't actively share specific financial data, there isn't a good way to be able to verify and audit what exactly a Meta 'page counter' pixel is doing (and what Meta is doing with that data).
Regardless of the details it's an area that needs A LOT more regulatory scrutiny.
There should be only one tax site, it should be operated by the IRS, and, as US citizens, we should not be required to disclose our financial information to any private company in order to efficiently file our taxes.
Use your brain on this stuff. Think about how many billions of requests are being sent from pixels every day. Facebook is not looking through hundreds of millions of unique URLs and form data to find some obscure user data that their Ad systems aren't trained for.
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.
I don't like the word "share" in this context: these financial companies didn't simply give away info, they got something in return and I would like more info about what they got.
The financial companies got higher performing ads delivered to the right people, as well as the ability to measure the actions taken from the ads. In exchange, they gave away your data for free.
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.
>The financial companies got higher performing ads delivered to the right people, as well as the ability to measure the actions taken from the ads. In exchange, they gave away your data for free.
It seems like we have a name for such transaction. Where one party gives something to get something else from second party.
> It seems like we have a name for such transaction. Where one party gives something to get something else from second party
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.
Well the definition of a sale is usually the exchange of a commodity for money.
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.
Well the definition of sharing would be "to have or use something at the same time as someone else", so as you both have access to the data after the action and can both use it at the same time, I think sharing could be considered valid alongside bartered.
The one that isn't accurate though would be sale, which is an exchange for money.
I don't think that's necessarily the case - e.g. "Let's share my car and you can help me clean it at the weekend" is a valid sharing arrangement (i.e. share the asset and share the effort to maintain).
Well, we're deep into worthless pedantry here, but I love worthless pedantry.
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.
“Trade” may be more accurate than “sale” for an exchange for valuable consideration that is neither money nor denominated in currency, and is certainly much better than “sharing” for an exchange (though I think “sale” is, itself, though loose still reasonable and much better than “sharing”.)
If you think its JUST ads, boy, do I have a bridge to sell you.
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 )
"If you give me six datapoints generated by the devices of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Pixel, Google tag manager and Bluekai (?, that one from Oracle) are in a lot of sites and mobile apps.
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.
This is the sort of thing why you really want to block 3rd party JS. There are plenty of JS blockers out there, get one and very selectively enable the stuff that you need.
I keep reading these articles. They say that tax sites "shared" or "gave" user data via active pixels, but is that really true?
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.
Wait, why would Meta & Google even want your tax data??
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??
They now know what those people can afford, what schemes they might be vulnerable enough to buy into, etc.
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.
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.
There are also entire industries that target low income individuals, such as diploma mills and payday loans.
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.
And cheaper cars. It's not all negative. It's just different products for different segments. High income earners will get targeted with vanity degrees and ludicrously expensive "experiences".
There’s no allegation that they actually wanted it or attempted to extract tax data. They have it now, but it seems more like gross negligence rather than some nefarious plot.
I feel that that would be a pretty disingenuous claim on their part. "Oh, no-one at Meta noticed that the payload also included 'what deductions that person was eligible for', or noticed and said 'eh, seems fine to me'?"
Think about how many requests pixels are sending to meta every day. Probably billions. I guarantee you nobody is looking at the arbitrary form data from millions of unique urls.
They don't. There is no semantic value to this data for them. To Google and Meta, it's an arbitrary data point. To tax companies, it is data that can utilized to either target the delivery or measure the performance of their own ads.
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.
Is this actually what's happening, or are you just guessing?
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.
It's not Hotjar specifically trying to grab tax returns, true, but if Hotjar is using the data sent to it for its own purposes, then it doesn't actually matter if they intended to get tax returns specifically or not. They're still doing wrong.
I don't know. But they certainly obtained it, and it would be out of character for Meta not to capitalize on it. I think the assumption they used it is a reasonable one, given their history.
I disagree, especially when half the stories are like this one, and only exist because of all the other stories supporting them, so this one must be true.
This is one more reason why we need to move to a single-tax system. No tax on labor, because we want more labor and you should keep what you make. No tax on capital, because we want more investment so that labor is more effective.
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.
Look, I'm at work and don't have time to dive deep into economic theory. If you read the source articles you'll see it has a 100 year plus history and is well grounded in basics of economics, in fact has more accurate base terms than most theories-- it is the first one to recognize that land and capital are separate concepts.
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.
This should be the reason why these sites should no longer exist. The IRS should have this as a built-in service. Or better yet, return-free filing like most other large economy countries.
It would be easier if the tax code was simplified, oh wait the tax-prep companies are also lobbying against that. Maybe we should dismantle them, take their money away and use that to pay lawyers and tax specialists to simplify the tax code and create a nice and easy filing interface.
I don't want the tax code simplified, I want them to send me a tax bill and for that to be the end of the story for those of us not running a business.
I mean, for myself personally, they already have everything from my bank, brokerage and employer and my job is to send them a copy of a bunch of forms they already have and have them do calculations they already did.
And while many of the people on this forum direct deposit their salary from their single white-collar job into a bank and take the standard deduction, tens of millions of Americans don't.
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.
The system I've heard people recommend is that the government gives you a tax form with everything filled out and you can either pay that or redo it yourself with corrections.
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.
W2s and 1099s are common, but they are a very small part of what someone could have on their 1040. If, as proposed above, we'd want to automate it without simplifying the tax code, there is way more information required. You'd need to know nearly every exchange of value that someone makes and why they did it. And they'd need to more closely track where people live, travel, work, etc.
A generic link to the FedNow website doesn't even begin to substantiate your claim. To start with, where is there any evidence that FedNow intends to share any information about individual payments with the Treasury department?
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?
FedNow is for payments. That is a small subset of the information needed to determine someone's tax given the current landscape of credits and deductions.
Easier said than done. Given the depth and breadth of the tax code and the types of information that might be relevant, I don't see how it could be automated as-is without violating the 4th amendment.
That is a huge part of it, but I've heard one of the other major barriers are people who are just plain anti-tax since they think anything more centralized would just give the government an excuse to sneak in new taxes.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument you are describing.
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.
There was no employer withholding originally. People wrote a check each year, which made the amounts very visible to each person. Employer withholding keeps it quiet and low-key so few resist the takings.
That would be a really regressive change in terms of who pays and how much they pay.
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)
Having lived and worked in Europe, I submitted yearly tax returns to various countries. The German payroll taxes were particularly troublesome to understand. And the countries had high sales taxes with VAT which causes more paperwork and encourages companies to vertically integrate.
Vat is specifically designed NOT to encourage vertical intergration. That's why it is structured the way it is and not paid by companies.
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)...
Yes simlified taxes - repeal the personal income tax and replace with consumption-based sales tax. No more W2 withholding, no more individual fed/state filing, no more deduction games, no need for tax prep sites.
Maybe the sales tax would be zero rate for uncooked food at grocery stores.
Simplified taxes does not have to mean lower taxes. You're conflating 2 issues (or intentionally associating them).
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.
You're implicitly implying that sales taxes would be lower than an income tax. Which they would not be (for most taxpayers), in order to raise the same amount of revenue.
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.
LLCs cannot be used to avoid income taxes. The income from an LLC passes through directly to the tax returns of the owners, where taxes on it are due and payable. Same with trusts and trust beneficiaries.
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.
So enact a hugely regressive tax that hits poor people the hardest as a percent of income, while lets rich people accumulate obscene wealth tax free? That’s what funding everything with sales tax does.
Poor people don't have mortgage interest deduction and other tax deduction acrobatics, so poor people are harmed today. And removal of paycheck W2 withholding would be a take home pay increase. The tax prep sites and government paper pushers would have to find something else to do for work. The corporate income tax could remain, if you like.
Poor people are harmed by the loopholes not the inherent principles, so instead of fixing the loopholes the proposal is to move a plan that inherently hurts poor people, no loop holes needed. Wow what a great plan.
To clarify, I suggest remove the personal income tax so there is no need for W2 withholding. Replace with a sales tax, with basic necessities having zero rate sales tax.
Consumption taxes are hugely regressive, and really hit poor people hard. This would make doing taxes easier and probably cheaper for well paid programmers (like many of us), and hit poor people hard. We need non-regressive taxes. California has high taxes but surprisingly is less regressive than many places. I say surprisingly because it's hard to overcome the power of wealthy people pushing tax rates down for themselves via political donation (such as is seen in the us federal tax system).
No reason to make it even worse. Some rich guy I know wanted to show me his art collection, a whole bunch of non-descript stuff that sold for an immense amount of money. All I could think was to encourage him to buy more art: his money would be in better hands if it flowed back into the world through the artists. Then I learned that it is just a speculative thing, that there is a whole industry around this and that the artists see almost nothing of the money. But the galleries, the 'connoisseurs', the auction houses and the brokers all make bank. And they too are rich people... quite frustrating.
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.
I keep reading these articles. They say that tax sites "shared" or "gave" user data via active pixels, but is that really true?
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.
My Occam's razor take would be that Google Analytics (and whatever Facebook have) are running on the sites and this is how financial information is being gathered.
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.
Well, your intuition was good. Apparently blowing ass smoke was exactly the strategy one company pursued when questioned about the pixels:
...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!
This is effectively false for the vast majority of tax payers. Tax preparation services can still exist for the relatively small number of people that require it.
> This is effectively false for the vast majority of tax payers
If you are imagining W2 workers with no business activity, children, inheritance, donations, property, or investments, I think this is actually a tiny portion.
Across my working lifetime, even with many of those things at some point in time, most years the IRS has (or can obtain) everything they need.
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.
Children and property are easily handled by the IRS; people with more sophisticated needs (inheritance, meaningful donations, investments) could still hire a professional to adjust what the IRS calculates. That's effectively what's happening now anyways, its just the IRS doesn't let you take their calculation at face value, you have to file your own and see if it matches.
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.
> Children and property are easily handled by the IRS
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?
It's false for something like 45-60% of tax payers. That's not a "vast majority", and that's just based on people who have previously used deductions. The IRS can't do this with small business owners for similar reasons.
I wonder how that compares to other features that have been added to Instagram over the years, like Stories or Reels? I suspect it is on the low side. It is only 4% of the user base.
I don't reckon that is super on-topic unless you are trying to relate this article to the amount of people willing to hand over their personal info via Threads/Meta. But that seems like an aggressive reach.
Tax sites are selling data because there is demand for that data, in this case from Meta (or Facebook/Instagram/Threads/WhatsApp etc).
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>
I think you were downvoted because your comment wasn't substantive and perceived to not be on topic. If anyone cares about their data privacy I would expect HN users to be on the frontlines.
Can't really make out the tone of the question, but I'll try to answer anyway.
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.
It's not like meta was buying up people's tax returns. Just negligence on the part of these tax sites.