The Federal Trade Committee (FTC) has warned five tax preparation companies that it may face civil sanctions to share secret data from taxpayers by tracking pixel units and other means.
The transition from federal organizers follows an investigation by coding last year, which found that the main preparatory companies to send sensitive personal and financial information to Facebook where Americans provided their taxes. The data that the tax preparatory companies shared included information on income, the state of deposit, the recovery amounts, and the scholarship amounts for the recovery college.
“Consumers in tax are confident who have sensitive information about their financial resources, marital condition, children, and health,” said Samuel Levin, director of the FTC Consumer Protection Office, in a statement announced by the procedure. “Companies that violate the privacy of Americans by seeking to liquidate personal data without approval that can face great financial consequences.”
The interrogation of the coding brand was publicly revealed how the main tax preparatory companies exchanged private data with Facebook. TAXACT, Taxlayer, and H & R Block found among companies that send the most sensitive information. FTC sent notifications to those companies as well as Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, and RAMSEY tax solutions.
“The company is compatible with the internal revenue service rules and” does not participate in the tax declaration information with the social media platforms for marketing or any other purpose, “said Reck Heinman, an Intuit spokesperson, who initially found joint data such as user names and email addresses with Facebook. None of the other tax preparatory companies immediately responded to the comment. A parent company spokesman for Facebook, Meta, refused to comment.
Data was sent to Facebook and Meta with a tool called Meta Pixel. Pixel is an excerpt from the widely used code that collects and transports information because people are browsing the Internet. Companies that include pixels on web sites can track visitors for advertising purposes, and META can use the data collected to run their algorithms.
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Achieving signs led to a report in Congress and found that companies had acted recklessly in their participation in data and also to the invitations of federal legislators to organizers to take action. FTC’s notification is the first general step of federal organizers on this issue since the publication of the article. The committee voted unanimously 3-0 to use its authority to send notifications.
A spokesman for the agency did not answer questions about what specifically motivated the procedure. But messages to companies, publicly published by FTC, notice specifically that “tracking techniques such as pixels” and other means of collecting digital information can lead to financial penalties if consumers believe their information should have remained confidential.
These penalties say messages, companies can cost more than $ 50,000 per violation. The tax preparatory companies, the most prominent of which is Markup, which is used by millions of customers every year, used pixels for an unknown period of time.
“We are aware of the information that indicates that you have participated in deceptive or unfair behavior,” letters to companies. “You must take a quick action, including by reviewing all your practices, to ensure that any deceptive or illegal claims stopped and are removed or corrected, as necessary, and any other required disclosure is made.”
revision
September 19, 2023: A previous version of this article stated that FTC was not named companies that received notifications.
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