Meta Faces Lawsuit For Harvesting Financial Data From Tax Prep Websites – A group of anonymous plaintiffs who used H&R Block to file their taxes online in 2020 have filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the company has violated users’ trust and privacy. If you recall, a Markup investigation recently found that H&R Block and other well-known tax-filing websites like TaxAct and TaxSlayer were sending their customers’ sensitive financial information to Meta through its Pixel tracking tool.
Pixel is a piece of code that companies can embed on their websites to track visitor activity and identify Facebook and Instagram users to target with ads. Apparently, the aforementioned tax prep websites were sending personal information to Meta via that code, such as income data, filing statuses, refund amounts, and dependents’ tuition grants. By the time Markup’s report was published, the tax-filing services had already changed their Pixel settings to stop sending information or were rethinking how they used Pixel.
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In a statement sent to Engadget when the news first came out, Meta said that advertisers are prohibited from sharing personal information and that it uses an automated system that can filter out sensitive content sent through Pixel. The plaintiffs acknowledged in their complaint (PDF, courtesy of The Markup) that Meta does require businesses that use Pixel to “have lawful rights to collect, use and share” user data before providing the company with any information.
However, the plaintiffs argue that Meta makes no effort to enforce that rule and instead relies on a “broken honor-system” that has resulted in “repeated, documented violations.” The lawsuit, according to The Markup, seeks class action status for people who used the tax preparation services mentioned in the publication’s report. However, the services themselves were not named as defendants in the case.
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