Sen. Elizabeth Warren is coming for the tracking pixels

 

Tax prep companies let Google and Facebook sell ads off your data

A new congressional report about an internet privacy violation might actually lead to consequences.

This kind of tracking happens all over the internet and on our mobile devices, and there’s very little we can do to stop it or know it’s even happening. Sites and apps do it to get analytics and for advertising, an arrangement that can be mutually beneficial to the companies that embed the trackers and the companies doing the tracking. Those trackers can be recklessly deployed, scooping up and sending off far more information than is actually needed. The Markup’s investigative series into trackers has found several examples of this in addition to the tax prep report. When a company isn’t beholden to privacy laws, it may not want to or care to put the time and effort into monitoring what it’s sending off. But there are regulations about certain kinds of data in limited circumstances. Health data is one. Tax data is another. Oops!

 

In their defense, the tax prep companies either said they knew about the trackers but didn’t think they violated any laws, or claimed that they didn’t know all of the data that those trackers were sharing. The new congressional report’s authors did not seem to find these excuses or justifications to be sufficient, excoriating the companies for their “complete lack of corporate responsibility and accountability” and asking the heads of the Internal Revenue Service, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to look into potential violations of the law in a separate letter. . .

Tax prep companies let Google and Facebook sell ads off your data   Sen. Elizabeth Warren is coming for the tracking pixels.   Specifically, she, along with fellow Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden, Richard Blumenthal, Tammy Duckworth, Bernie Sanders, and Sheldon Whitehouse, and Rep. Katie Porter, are coming for tax preparation companies that sent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of taxpayers’ data to Big Tech through those tracking pixels.   On Wednesday, the lawmakers released a report detailing how TaxAct, H&R Block, and TaxSlayer put Meta and Google's tracking pixels on their sites, sharing taxpayers’ data with those companies in what could be a violation of the law. It shows how extensive this data collection and sharing is, even on web services that you’d expect or trust would keep your information private. The situation also shows how a lack of privacy laws has helped make this practice so widespread and ingrained into the fabric of the internet itself, to the point that even companies that may have a legal obligation to keep our data private don’t know or don’t care that they aren’t doing so. . ." —Sara Morrison, senior reporter  Article continues >>