Websites that provide services for filing reports and tax returns in the US, including TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have transferred sensitive financial information to Facebook. The information, sent via Meta Pixel, includes names and email addresses, data on users' income, filing status, refund amounts and scholarship amounts. .
Meta Pixel is a tool that allows you to track the activity of website visitors.
Personal and financial information has been transferred.
Also on revenues, photo: Reuters
When users register to file their taxes on the TaxAct website, for example, they are asked to provide personal information, such as how much money they make and what their investments are.
A pixel on TaxAct's website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users' filing status, their income and their refund amount, the nonprofit The Markup reported.
TaxAct wasn't the only tax filing service using Meta Pixel.
For example, H&R Block, which offers an online submission option, implemented a pixel on its website that collected information about the grants and tuition expenses of students.
TaxSlayer, another widely used service in the U.S., sent personal information to Facebook as part of the social media company's "advanced matching" system, which collects information about online visitors in an attempt to link them to Facebook accounts. The information collected through the pixel on TaxSlayer's website included phone numbers, username which fills out the form and names any dependents added to the return.As with TaxAct, specific demographic information about a user has been hidden but can still be used by Facebook to link a user to an existing profile.
"It goes against company policy."
Meta, photo: Reuters
After The Markup contacted TaxSlayer, it said the company removed the pixel to evaluate its use.
"The privacy of our customers is of the utmost importance, and we take concerns about our customers' information very seriously."
How does Meta pixel track users?
Using the pixel helps both Facebook and businesses.
When a customer arrives at the business's website, the pixel records the items the customer viewed.
The business can then target its Facebook ads to people who viewed those items.
In 2018, Facebook told Congress that there were more than two million pixels across the web — a massive data collection operation.
The pixels implemented by TaxSlayer and TaxAct used a feature called "advanced automatic adjustment".
This feature scans forms for fields that it believes contain personally identifiable information such as a phone number, first name, last name, or email address, and then sends the personally identifiable information to Meta.
In 2018, the company reported more than two million pixels across the Internet.
Mark Zuckerberg, photo: AP
The data collected by the matching feature is sent in an obscure form known as a hash, which Meta claims is used to "help protect user privacy."
But the company can usually determine the obfuscated version of the data beforehand – in fact Meta explicitly uses the information to link other pixel data to Facebook and Instagram profiles.
In Meta they said: "Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our business tools. This is against our policy and we teach advertisers about the correct definition of business tools to prevent this."
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