A congressional report found TaxAct, H&R Block, and TaxSlayer sent your tax data to Meta and Google without permission through tracking pixels. They captured your name, address, income, refund amount, and number of dependents. The companies sold this information for targeted ads and AI training.
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A big report came out of Congress that affects the tax world. It's definitely going to affect a lot of people and probably, you know, a good amount of our listeners. But, you know, basically this congressional report exposed that there were 3 large tax prep firms, specifically TaxAct, H&R Block, and TaxSlayer, had been sharing taxpayer information with Meta, Meta being what Facebook has evolved into in the last few years, and Google and other tech firms without people's permission. When it comes to your personal information, sharing is not caring. People would be going onto these websites to file their taxes. Some of this was, was paid and then, uh, some of this was also IRS Free File for lower income taxpayers. They would go onto these websites to file their taxes and they were using these things called pixels, which are little tracking, little tracking bots that would record people's information. They were getting your, uh, obviously your name and your address, but also your filing status. So they knew if you were married or single, approximate gross income for the year, approximate refund, and also how many dependents you had. So this was very valuable data for Meta and Google, and they were using this to target ads to taxpayers and also for AI algorithms.
