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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Cory Doctorow
Richelle Sparrow