Some congressional Democrats say three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over at least two years.
Tax data is tightly regulated, with penalties for improper sharing including fines and jail time. The report found the companies involved likely didn’t receive proper consent to share the data and could face criminal penalties.
Jail time for the heads of Meta/Facebook, Google, H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer?! No chance. All corporates involved will, at most, get a ‘tsk,tsk’ and a fine they’ll earn back in an hour.
Seems like a great time to mention the Firefox Facebook Container add-on!
Pretty sure you don’t need the extension anymore. All cookies are now isolated on a per website basis…
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-protection/
The add-on I linked is written and maintained by Mozilla and was updated as recently as Jul 6 of this year. The blog post you linked to is from 2021. If it wasn’t doing something more it seems like Mozilla would be wasting their time. I do admit to being too ignorant about everything it is doing and thats on me, so if anything your post has made me want to know more. Here’s the repo where it is being developed: https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook
Me too tbh. I used to use the extension but removed it assuming it was no longer required.
I found this issue on the repo which seems to suggest there’s still a benefit to using both…
My bank has Facebook and Adobe trackers on their website. I block them but it’s just so dumb that they do that. Obviously most people have no idea it’s happening.
This is a part of a larger issue, obviously, but this specific part of the problem could easily be resolved with tax reform. The IRS knows exactly how much you owe them so why do you have to pay a 3rd party to prepare it for you? Apparently in other countries the government tells you how much you owe and you just let them know if you disagree with that amount for some reason.
But that type of tax reform won’t happen because these companies dump massive amounts of $$$ into lobbying.
If you’re wondering who but don’t want to read the article:
Their report urges federal agencies to investigate and potentially go to court over the wealth of information that H&R Block, TaxAct and Tax Slayer shared with the social media giant.
Yikes. Side question- anyone know if GDPR protects against stuff like this?
We really need a way to protect our data in the US. (I know GDPR isn’t related to US)
Some states do have at least something, Virginia and California that I know of. We aren’t Europeans though to gdpr doesn’t apply to us, we just get tangential benefits from companies who don’t want to have two ways of doing things depending upon if you’re in Europe or not. If all those websites that added opt in cookie boxes to their websites and whatnot wanted to strip all that out and serve special pages to Europeans they could.
“If your organization collects, uses, or stores the personal data of people in the EU, then you must comply“
Holy shit why are these companies doing anything with Meta. This is super scary.
I don’t want anything to do with Meta, but now I can’t use pretty much any service without Meta getting my data anyway? I want off this ride.
