Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by slashdev 1075 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.
2 comments
pixl97 1075 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.

link
slashdev 1074 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.
link
adeelk93 1074 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.
link
throw10920 1074 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.
link
lukeschlather 1075 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.

link