{"id":7518,"date":"2022-11-27T14:42:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-27T21:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=7518"},"modified":"2022-11-27T14:42:36","modified_gmt":"2022-11-27T21:42:36","slug":"tax-filing-software-has-been-sending-your-income-amounts-to-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=7518","title":{"rendered":"Tax filing software has been sending your income amounts to Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/11\/22\/23471842\/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/11\/22\/23471842\/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Markup reports<\/a> that tax filing services like H&amp;R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly sending their financial information to Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These services use <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/developers.facebook.com\/docs\/meta-pixel\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/developers.facebook.com\/docs\/meta-pixel\" target=\"_blank\">Meta Pixel<\/a> (also known as the Facebook retargeting pixel) &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It turns out the information sent included users&#8217; income, filing status, refund amounts, and other information. The team that found this behavior has a <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/the-markup\/meta-pixel-taxes\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/github.com\/the-markup\/meta-pixel-taxes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">github repo that shows the actual data sent<\/a> if you want the gory details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Intuit&#8217;s TurboTax also uses Meta Pixel &#8211; but they do not appear to send financial information to Meta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just more reason to be very cautious about the tax software you use. As was noted over 10 years ago, <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/lifehacker.com\/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product-5697167\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/lifehacker.com\/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-youre-the-product-5697167\" target=\"_blank\">if you&#8217;re not paying for it, YOU (or your personal data) ARE the product being sold (to someone else)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Markup reports that tax filing services like H&amp;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) &#8211; 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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=7518\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool","category-technical"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-1Xg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7519,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7518\/revisions\/7519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}