Frog March Zuckerberg Out of His Offices in Handcuffs

Remember when the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ was caught collecting sensitive personally identifying medical information?

Well, now we find that they did the same thing on income tax preparation sites.

The short version is that the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ provided web tools to allow the tax preparation companies to identify how their users used the sites, with the goal of improving the user experience.

What Meta did not do was tell these companies that with the default settings, information like, their names, filing status, gross income, student loan status, number of dependents, and amount of refund.

Consent decrees and do not cut it.  We need to start criminally prosecuting executives at places like Meta and Google for their blatant and willful violation of their users' privacy:

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned.

The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.

The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner, Meta.

………

When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally reversible, format.

………

TaxAct wasn’t the only tax filing service using the Meta Pixel. Tax preparation giant H&R Block, which also offers an online filing option that attracts millions of customers per year, embedded a pixel on its site that gathered information on filers’ health savings account usage and dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses.

………

Megan McConnell, a spokesperson for Ramsey Solutions, said in an email that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience.”

“We did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel,” the statement said. “As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.”

After The Markup contacted TaxSlayer, spokesperson Molly Richardson said in an email that the company had removed the pixel to evaluate its use. “Our customers’ privacy is of utmost importance, and we take concerns about our customers’ information very seriously,” she said, adding that Ramsey Solutions “decided to remove the pixel” as well.

Assuming that the statements from the tax preparation firms are not self-serving lies, (and that is a big assumption) then not only is Meta deceiving its users, who are what they sell, but it is deceiving its customers, and that is fraud.

Seriously, we need to start arresting and trying senior executives.

Elizabeth Holmes cannot be that alpha and omega of prosecution of criminal executives in the tech space.