Tax prep services send sensitive financial info to Facebook

And they didn’t even know they were doing it.

If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsenually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

A blockbuster investigative report from The Markup and The Verge reveals that major tax-prep services illegally embedded the Facebook tracking pixel in their sites, configured so that it transmitted as much data as possible to the surveillance giant.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing

In their defense, the companies say that they didn’t know that they were sending all this data to Facebook, and that they were using Facebook’s surveillance pixel to “deliver a more personalized customer experience.”

The companies had set the Facebook tracking pixel to use “automatic advanced matching,” which scours any page it’s embedded in for personally identifying information to harvest and transmit to Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668?id=1205376682832142