If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US #tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts.
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A blockbuster investigation from *The Markup* and *The Verge* reveals that major tax-prep services illegally embedded the Facebook tracking pixel in their sites, configured so that it transmitted as much data as possible to the surveillance giant.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing
In their defense, the companies say that they didn't know that they were sending all this data to Facebook, and that they were using Facebook's #surveillance pixel to "deliver a more personalized customer experience."
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The companies had set the Facebook tracking pixel to use "automatic advanced matching," which scours any page it's embedded in for personally identifying information to harvest and transmit to Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668?id=1205376682832142
Facebook claims that it doesn't want this data and won't use it, though the company has been previously caught violating fair finance laws by using finance data to discriminate against Black families:
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But it's possible that Facebook isn't using this data - or that it doesn't know whether it's using this data. Facebook's own internal audits show that the company doesn't know what data it collects or how it uses it:
Remember, Facebook claims that it collects your data based on your consent; somehow it thinks that you can consent to collecting and using your data in ways that even Facebook can't describe.
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As infuriating as Facebook's role in this data theft is, the real scandal is that Americans have to pay for tax preparation *at all*. In most of the world's wealthy countries, the tax authorities send taxpayers a precompleted tax-return every year. You can modify this return (on your own or with the help of a tax-prep professional), or you can just mail it back. For free.
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This makes sense. The tax authorities already know how much you've made. They know what deductions you're entitled to. It is surreal that you have to pay a professional to fill in a form to tell the #IRS a bunch of things it already know about you.
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Every attempt to bring free tax prep to America has been scuttled by an unholy alliance of anti-tax extremists like #GroverNordquist (a sadist who wants to make paying your tax as cumbersome and painful as possible) and the multi-billion-dollar, highly concentrated tax-prep industry.
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Companies like HR Block and Intuit have spent millions lobbying against free tax prep. It's money well spent, because tax prep makes billions for these companies. The biggest tax prep companies formed something called "the #FreeFileAlliance" that purported to offer free tax-prep to low- and medium-income Americans.
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In practice, "free filing" turned out to be a marketing funnel that tricked people into paying for services they were entitled to get for free. Intuit alone stole billions this way:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks
The #monopolists who run America's tax-prep services claim that "government can't do anything well" and insist that the private sector will bring "efficiencies" to tax-prep.
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In reality, these companies literally have no idea what they're doing - they don't know what data they're collecting, nor who they're sharing it with.
Same goes for Facebook. Companies that are not disciplined by competition or regulation don't have to be good at their jobs. These companies' major competence is lobbying Congress to prevent the passage of meaningful privacy laws and laws that would save Americans billions through IRS-prepared tax-returns.
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As Harvard tax-law prof Mandi Matlock told Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Angie Waller, and Colin Lecher, this #DataValdez is the "almost inevitable consequence of relying on for-profit companies to handle a government requirement. It’s a process that provides users little choice but to hand over their data to Facebook if they want to comply with the law."
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Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
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Social Woodlands (modified)
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H%26R_Block_%285424899168%29.jpg
CC BY 2.0
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@pluralistic PSA: The IRS actually has a program called VITA where they provide grants and training for volunteer tax preparers to assist folks making under $60k in filing their taxes for free. As long as you meet the income requirements, they can handle some pretty complex tax situations. It's been a few years since I volunteered, but I recall one year when the organizer sent us a summary showing how many millions of dollars of tax refunds we had processed that otherwise would have gone through these predatory companies. It was a good feeling.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/free-tax-return-preparation-for-qualifying-taxpayers
@denyerec @pluralistic @cjbooker
Definitely a Mastodon misfeature... this needs to change.
@skry @tasket @pluralistic @cjbooker Indeed there's no issue once you tap any of the thread entries - just the timeline appearance.
Perhaps there's a Mastodon specific way of doing it, or perhaps they're just not that far down their to do list :)
@denyerec @skry @pluralistic @cjbooker
There's an issue because anyone who follows a person who makes lengthy threads will have their own TL inundated – it's all or nothing.
the greatest lie the devil ever told was that capitalism would sacrifice even a tiny percentage of its ability to overcharge in order to provide "efficiencies" to consumers.
@pluralistic in the Netherlands, I paid an accountant to do my taxes for the year I bought a house. The deductible elements weren’t always clear.
I quite enjoy the difference from Canada. Even though doing taxes in Canada wasn’t particularly difficult with primarily salary income.
@baberiel_d @pluralistic ever done taxes in a language you aren’t fully fluent in?
I can read Dutch pretty well, but the more advanced operations where tens of thousands of euros are potentially on the line, I’m willing to splurge.
Especially when most years are:
“Oh, it’s time to do my taxes”
Log into tax agency web site using MFA
“Yeah, that looks good”
Click okay
Dutch payslips and notary receipts look like someone scattered random numbers.
@baberiel_d the first year we filed, I got a letter from them saying something like “the payment of €X should take place soon”
But it was unclear if the payment was to be made TO us or FROM us. We ran it past native speakers and they weren’t sure either. So, I’m suspicious ;)
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