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.

13 points
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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.

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9 points

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.

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6 points

This zucks

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16 points

Seems like a great time to mention the Firefox Facebook Container add-on!

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6 points

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/

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5 points

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

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4 points

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…

https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/issues/851

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18 points

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.

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