Some congressional Democrats say three large tax preparation firms sent “extraordinarily sensitive” information on tens of millions of taxpayers to Facebook parent company Meta over at least two years. Their report issued Wednesday urges federal agencies to investigate and potentially go to court over the information H&R Block, TaxAct and Tax Slayer shared with the social media giant. In a letter to the heads of the IRS, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the IRS watchdog, the lawmakers say the findings “reveal a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy.” The tax prep companies say they take the privacy of their customers seriously.
I’d think no because the companies had to explicitly install Meta’s Pixel on their websites and specifically chose what data to send. Skimming, it sounds like Pixel is clearly documented as being to improve the accuracy of ads that Meta delivers.
So the companies knew exactly how this data was going to be used and still voluntarily sent it to Meta.
That said, Meta absolutely should have recognized that this data was too sensitive and banned the companies. Ok, let’s be honest, they’d never do that on their own free will, since the data is obviously extremely valuable to them. More like there needs to be a law preventing Meta from using such data, because companies can’t be trusted to do the right thing on their own.