Tax Filing Websites Caught Sending Users’ Financial Data to Facebook
The three websites—which together help more than 25 million Americans file their taxes annually—use Meta’s JavaScript code (called “Meta Pixel”) to capture user data and send it Facebook’s way, according to the nonprofit tech investigations newsletter The Markup. H&R Block, one of the country’s most recognizable tax filing firms, was found using Meta Pixel to obtain users’ health savings account usage data as well as dependents’ college expense information. TaxAct was caught using the code to track users’ filing status, dependents, adjusted gross income, and refund totals. TaxAct appears to have lazily attempted to anonymize this data by scrambling dependent names and rounding income and refunds to the nearest thousand and hundred respectively; however, The Markup found the former obfuscation to be easily reversible.
TaxSlayer appears to have used Meta Pixel to capture the most detailed user information. Using a “Meta Pixel Inspector” it developed earlier this year, The Markup found that TaxSlayer habitually gathered users’ names, phone numbers, and dependent names. A specific form of TaxSlayer incorporated into personal finance celebrity Dave Ramsey’s websites also obtained users’ income and refund totals. When The Markup asked Ramsey Solutions about its use of Meta Pixel, the company said it hadn’t known about the code’s data-grabbing element and allegedly removed it from its sites. TaxAct similarly stopped capturing users’ financial data but continued to record dependents’ names.
But why? What incentive does Facebook have to grab Americans’ tax information? As it nearly always does, the answer comes down to money. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, regularly uses its approximately 2 million Meta Pixels to capture web users’ browsing activity, demographic data, and more. This information is then used to ensure Facebook and Instagram users are seeing ads they might actually click, thus supporting Meta’s lucrative marketing operations.
The IRS, having been made aware of the tax websites’ Meta Pixel usage, could render Facebook’s tax data harvesting financially useless. Websites that share users’ tax information without consent can face steep fines, and as of Tuesday, H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer lacked the disclosures necessary to claim consent.
Continue reading
OnePlus Caught Manipulating Smartphone Performance Benchmarks
Despite having ample power, the OnePlus 9 is aggressively throttling performance for most apps while allowing benchmarks full power. As a result, its phones have been pulled from the Geekbench charts.
Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs
Western Digital is the latest company caught bait-and-switching its customers with lousy SSD speeds. In other news, Samsung and Intel don't appear to be trying to cheat customers this way, while Crucial and Adata apparently are.
Samsung Is the Latest SSD Manufacturer Caught Cheating Its Customers
Samsung has joined the ranks of companies found shipping faster SSDs to reviewers than to consumers without telling anyone about it.
Family Safety App Life360 Caught Selling User Location Data
Keeping track of your family now comes with an unexpected price: handing over your location data to Amazon and the US Military.