The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned five tax preparation companies that they can deal with civil penalties for sharing confidential data from taxpayers by monitoring picnic and other means.
The transition from federal regulators follows a markup investigation last year that found major PREP prep companies that sent sensitive personal and financial information on Facebook while Americans filed their taxes. Data shared by tax prep companies includes information about revenue, filing status, refund value, and scholars 'scholars' scholar.
“Consumers trust taxes with sensitive information about their finances, marital status, children, and health,” Samuel Levine, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of FTC, said in a statement that expresses the action. “Companies that violate American privacy by seeking to make money personal data without permission can deal with significant financial consequences.”
Markup's investigation is the first to reveal the public of how major tax prep companies shared private data on Facebook. The taxact, taxslayer, and H&R block are among the companies that send the most sensitive information, the markup is found. The FTC has sent notifications to those companies as well as the Intuit, Parent Turbotax company, and the Ramsey Tax Solutions company.
Rick Heineman, a spokesman for Intuit, who first found the markup shared data such as usernames and email addresses on Facebook, said in a statement that the company complies with internal income rules and “does not share tax return information on social media platforms for marketing or any other purpose.” None of the other tax prep companies received notifications immediately responded to a request for comment. A spokesman for Facebook's parent Meta, refused to comment.
The data is sent to Facebook and Meta through a tool called Meta Pixel. Pixel is a widely used code snippet that accumulates and sends information as people browse the internet. Businesses that include pixel on websites can track visitors for advertising purposes, and meta can use accumulated data to empower its algorithms.
[[[[[Markup's investigation led to a Congress report that the companies found that they were reckless in their data sharing and also calls from federal lawmakers for regulators to act. The FTC notice is the first public transition from federal regulators to the issue since the article was published. The Commission agrees to vote 3-0 to use its authority to send notifications.
A speaker for the agency did not respond to questions about what specifically motivated the action. But letters to companies, copies where FTC has posted to the public, specifically note that “monitoring technologies such as pixels” and other forms of digital information can lead to financial penalties if consumers reasonably believe that their information should be kept confidential.
Those penalties, letters will continue, companies can cost more than $ 50,000 per violation. Prep Prep companies that have highlighting the markup investigation, used by millions of customers each year, are working on pixel for an unknown period of time.
“We know information that suggests that you are engaged or engaged in fraudulent or unfair behavior,” the letters to the state of the companies. “You must take immediate action, along with the evaluation of all your skills, to ensure any fraudulent or unlawful claims are stopped and removed or corrected, if appropriate, and any other required disclosure is made.”
Correction
September Thursday -19, 2023: An earlier version of this article said the FTC did not name the companies that received the notifications.
Credits: Colin Locher, Investigative Reporter
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