The Markup reports that tax filing services like H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly sending their financial information to Facebook.

These services use Meta Pixel (also known as the Facebook retargeting pixel) – a snippet of code inserted into the back end of your website to track visitor activity. It works by loading a small library of functions which can use whenever a site visitor takes an action (called an event) that they want to track (called a conversion). Tracked conversions appear in the Ads Manager where they can be used to measure the effectiveness.

It turns out the information sent included users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and other information. The team that found this behavior has a github repo that shows the actual data sent if you want the gory details.

Intuit’s TurboTax also uses Meta Pixel – but they do not appear to send financial information to Meta.

Just more reason to be very cautious about the tax software you use. As was noted over 10 years ago, if you’re not paying for it, YOU (or your personal data) ARE the product being sold (to someone else)