Meta facing lawsuit over reported tax sharing scandal
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Meta has been sued for allegedly infringing 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 amounts. pay back to Meta.
This would then have been used by the tech giant to produce tailored, targeted ads based on the data on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The lawsuit, which was filed on December 1, concerns users using H&R Block.
The Submit (opens in new tab) claims that even though users “expressly refused” to share their data with Meta, the company collected them anyway.
While the prosecution acknowledged that Meta demanded that companies have a “legal right to collect, use and share user data,” it subsequently claimed that this was not honored, instead relying “on a broken honor system that has resulted in in repeated, documented violations of Meta’s own contractual promises and state and federal law”.
Despite the tech giant’s alleged misconduct, current users of the aforementioned pieces of tax software have nothing to worry about.
According to The layout (opens in new tab), all of the aforementioned tax platforms have already completely removed Pixel or changed the setting to not collect additional financial information from users.
It is important to note that the tax authorities themselves were not listed as defendants in the filing, placing all of Meta’s alleged misconduct.
Legal disputes are certainly not unknown to Meta.
The company was hit with a fine of €265 million for data protection from the Irish Data Protection Commission over allegations that the company failed to protect the personal data of half a billion users, bringing the total amount of EU fines to date to more than €1 billion.
- Do you want to be sure that your data does not fall into the wrong hands? Check out our guide to the best privacy tools.