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.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
317 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59166 readers
2310 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
Except H&R Block have offices in the EU and they, knowingly, serve EU citizens living in the US (and likely EU citizens living in Europe).
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.
More money.
💀
That shit makes me so angry it's crazy... Socialism for the corporations, "rugged individualism" for the citizens...
Republicans will scream and cry about socialism when we discuss healthcare, but gladly give corporations all the public money/wealth they could possibly want while also allowing them to charge us for the "product" they create...
The IRS already has all the relevant tax info for 99% of people. With only a few tiny changes in practice (like opening portals for applying for certain tax credits e.g., IRA incentives), we could get rid of tax prep software almost entirely and replace it with a simple bill. And for most people, the stuff they don't automatically know about increases your tax burden instead of decreasing it. If you aren't wealthy, they have zero incentive to chase you down on this kind of minor stuff like grey-market income, so diligently using tax prep software can really only increase the amount you owe. But we're forced to do so.
Having prefilled tax returns / billed taxes would likely lead to less cost and overhead within the IRS. It would nearly entirely fix the vast amount of unclaimed annual refunds that exist, which represents real money taken out of the pockets almost exclusively of the working class. Very wealthy people and folks who have extremely complex tax liabilities would still likely need professional preparation... but odds are they needed it anyway. And anyone could still have the option to contest/manually file if the new system were set up well.
The tax prep lobby (H&R Block, Intuit, et al) are powerful, but their power has flagged significantly in the last few years. It may finally be a time where we can push for a better way. The IRS getting ready to offer its own tax prep software is a fabulous first step.
The point is, there's absolutely zero reason to have some weird market-based approach to taxes. It's just adding additional layers of rent-seekers for no purpose. Basically, it's US Conservative politics in a perfect microcosm.
The USA is sounding like a cyberpunk corpo dystopia more and more every day.
RoboCop was only a movie...right?
It honestly feels like that's the end goal.
Just sounding? They've already crossed that line some years ago IMO
Equifax and TransUnion entered the chat.
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.
This zucks