Joint reporting by The Verge and The Markup:
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.
Amazing that a service you pay for (and which should probably be free in a majority of cases!) also manages to sell you out to Facebook.
I’m not seeing mention of the Intuit TurboTax desktop software products doing something similar, so perhaps there’s a way to avoid this invasive tracking by shunning the web-based solutions these companies offer. Or perhaps the next investigation will turn up that it’s impossible to file your taxes without some amount of your personal data being shipped off to a data aggregator.