Meta is Being Sued for Harvesting Financial Data from Tax Companies

JAKARTA - Meta was sued by a group of anonymous plaintiffs for allegedly collecting sensitive taxpayer financial information from a major United States (US) electronic tax preparation company. The company distributed them without the owner's consent.

The anonymous group filed a lawsuit in California federal court, USA, recently. Looking back, a recent The Markup investigation revealed H&R Block, along with other popular tax preparation websites such as TaxAct and TaxSlayer, had submitted users' sensitive financial information to Meta through its Pixel tracking tool.

Pixels are pieces of code that companies can embed on their websites so they can track visitor activity and identify Facebook and Instagram users to target with ads.

The data includes not only information such as name and email address but more detailed information, including data on user income, filing status, refund amount, and college scholarship amount.

Meta can then use the information from the tax preparation company to power its advertising algorithms and is collected regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or another platform operated by Meta.

However, all three tax preparation services had changed their Pixel settings to stop sending information or had re-evaluated how they used Pixels at the time The Markup report came out.

Even so, TaxAct still sends financial information to Google Analytics. Citing Engadget, Monday, December 5, Meta said that advertisers are prohibited from sharing personal information and using automated systems that can filter sensitive content sent via Pixel.

The anonymous plaintiffs acknowledged in their complaint that Meta does require businesses that use Pixel to have legal rights to collect, use, and share user data before providing any information to the company.

However, the plaintiffs argue Meta made no attempt to enforce the rule and instead relied on a system that was broken, resulting in repeated and documented violations.

It is claimed, the lawsuit seeks class action status for the people who used the tax preparation services mentioned in the publication report. The service itself, however, is not named as a defendant in this case.