By Steve Dinnen
If you think Facebook knows way too much about you and your money, you can thank Cedar Rapids-based TaxAct Holdings Inc. for egging it along with some very private information.
Income tax preparation websites TaxAct, along with H&R Block and TaxSlayer, collect scads of information as they walk self-filers through completing tax returns. Those details include taxpayers’ filing status, income, refund amounts, names of dependents, approximate federal tax obligations. The programs know which buttons folks clicked on the tax preparers’ websites and the names of the text-entry forms that the taxpayer navigated.
The three companies track the information using pixels from Facebook parent Meta, a common technology used for custom targeting ads on social media. These are two-way streets, because they also send data to Meta, which accesses that data to write algorithms for its own users.
After journalists at the Markup reported this, federal lawmakers asked the IRS and U.S. Justice Department to investigate what the lawmakers’ investigative report calls “a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy by tax prep companies and by Big Tech firms.”
Leaders with TaxAct, TaxSlayer and H&R Block say they have since curbed or cut pixel transmissions to Meta. Since millions more websites use pixels, it’s little wonder that Meta and Google know where we are and what we’re up to.
