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by gopuck16 1067 days ago
Its on tax companies to do the due diligence on the users part to make sure they do not leak any taxpayer information. Its private information!

And meta and google analytics means there is data exchange, why do they want to do any "analytics" on people's personal data? Remove any and all analytics on tax websites.

Why are you straight up attacking the people by saying "Most people here in the comments clearly didn't read the article". They clearly did, understand and have full right to ask questions.
2 comments
slashdev 1067 days ago
Analytics is normal practice in any web application. However, using third party analytics in sensitive web applications is a bad idea. It is leaking private information, as you correctly point out.

> Why are you straight up attacking the people by saying "Most people here in the comments clearly didn't read the article". They clearly did, understand and have full right to ask questions.

At the time I wrote this comment, most people had clearly not read the article. Currently it still seems like a huge number of people still haven't since they're talking about things like the sale of tax information to meta, or why meta would want your tax information. There was no sale, meta likely didn't even know they had this information. It was just negligence. That's not attacking people, it's calling a spade a spade, which I will do without trepidation or remorse.

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pixl97 1067 days ago
> There was no sale, meta likely didn't even know they had this information.

This doesn't matter. If I did the same with your medical records HIPAA wouldn't give two shits. I improperly secured data, end of story. Even then you're depending on Meta telling us the truth (Of course I didn't look at that data, signed Mark). And even then you're depending on that data remaining secure and not getting piped off somewhere else.

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slashdev 1067 days ago
Meta is not the one at fault here. This is like blaming the garbage collector for you throwing out classified documents. Maybe they looked, maybe they didn't. But it's on you, not them. I mean it is on them too if they took advantage of it, but it's not obvious that's what happened here. It looks like gross negligence on the part of these tax web applications at minimum.
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adeelk93 1067 days ago
Not complying with the tax prep company’s requests is a bit suspect - we’ll see what happens, but it wouldn’t be impossible that Meta knew they had sensitive data and were taking advantage of it.
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throw10920 1067 days ago
Completely false. It absolutely matters a ton. I can block Facebook analytics with client-side tools. I can't do anything about my tax preparer directly sending my tax data to Facebook, and that's a much larger problem.
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lukeschlather 1067 days ago
> There was no sale

Maybe, maybe not. I think it merits investigation. Even if this was accidental I think it is still criminal negligence and should be prosecuted.

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JKCalhoun 1067 days ago
> Remove any and all analytics on tax websites.

Really ought to remove Corporate Analytic Software from all sites.

Is there an open-source alternative to handing over your entire site and all your users to the Big Two?

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