Meta facing lawsuit over reported tax sharing scandal

Date:
Mon, 05 Dec 2022 22:05:05 +0000

Description:
A lawsuit has alleged that Meta collected the data of users of several
popular tax software tools improperly.

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Meta has been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly infringing upon users' right
to privacy by collecting data from users of popular third-party tax software
.

The filing relates to recent allegations that online tax software tools such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer used the company's "Meta Pixel", a piece of javascript code, to send information such as names, email addresses,
income information, student loan data, and refund amounts back to Meta.

This would have then been used by the tech giant to produce custom, targeted ads based on the data on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Meta
claims

The lawsuit, which was filed on December 1, concerns users using H&R Block.

The filing claims that even though users "expressly declined" to have their data shared with Meta, the company collected it anyway.

Though the plaintiff's filing did acknowledge that Meta required businesses
to have a "lawful right to collect, use, and share" users' data, it went on
to claim that did not honor this, instead relying on a broken honor system that has resulted in repeated, documented violations of Metas own contractual promises and state and federal law".

Despite the alleged misconduct on the part of the tech giant, current users
of the aforementioned pieces of tax software should have nothing whatsoever
to worry about.

According to The Markup , all the aforementioned tax platforms have already either removed Pixel entirely or changed its setting so as to not gather any additional financial information from users.

It's important to note that the tax services themselves were not listed as defendants in the filing, placing all the alleged wrongdoing on the part of Meta. READ MORE:

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Meta is certainly no stranger to legal disputes.

The company was hit with a 265 million data protection fine from the Irish Data Protection Commission over claims the firm failed to protect the
personal data of half a billion users, bringing its total EU fines to date to well over 1 billion. Want to ensure your data doesn't fall into the wrong hands? Check out our guide to the best privacy tools .



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/meta-facing-lawsuit-over-reported-tax-sharing-s candal


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