Tax prep companies shared private taxpayer data with Google and Meta for years, congressional probe finds | CNN Business
www.cnn.com
Some of America’s largest tax-prep companies have spent years sharing Americans’ sensitive financial data with tech titans including Meta and Google in a potential violation of federal law — data that in some cases was misused for targeted advertising, according to a seven-month congressional investigation.
  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    Related question: why do we use rent-seeking corporations to process our taxes when the government knows what we should be paying anyway?

    Must be nice to be able to afford proper representation in government.

  • Empyreus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    So what we say ah ha we caught you doing something bad… And move on? What’s the point of they don’t get fined or punished?

  • CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    It should be illegal to share some kinds of data without a valid purpose. It already is for personal medical information, but taxes and other government correspondence (eg, immigration applications) should be covered as well.

    Honestly, it probably should straight up be illegal to sell information about your customers with third parties, period. But starting with the kinda information people most expect not to be shared would be the easiest and sanest to pass.

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
      7·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, it probably should straight up be illegal to sell information about your customers with third parties, period.

      The complicating factor is that it is the income generated by doing that that enables so many service to be free in the first place. At this point, everyone knows that Facebook, Google, etc are all collecting data on everything and monetizing it as much as possible. That’s not really a secret. So the question is, if customers are explicitly told that, in exchange for giving up some data, they can use a service for free, and they find this to be an agreeable proposition, what exactly is the problem? As you put it, even if you make it illegal to sell data without a “valid purpose”, is funding the free service the customer is using not a valid purpose?

      To be clear, I’d absolutely be in favor of laws mandating a very strong degree of transparency and control, à la GDPR such that consumers have absolute knowledge of what data is being collected, what is done with it, and are able to demand it be deleted, but if people are fully aware of the facts and decide that they’re okay with it, then so be it, IMO. And I think, for most people, this is basically the case. If YouTube, for instance, couldn’t advertise, there simply would not be a YouTube, and given how stupidly popular it is, more than a few people might be a bit upset about that.

      Edit: And to continue being clear, the actions in this article appear to already clearly violate existing laws, and of course the companies involved should be absolutely slammed with all possible punishment.