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Wait, why would Meta & Google even want your tax data?? Peeking at your credit cards purchase historic I can understand, as it tells them your shopping habits
by kramerger 3y ago
Wait, why would Meta & Google even want your tax data??
Peeking at your credit cards purchase historic I can understand, as it tells them your shopping habits and helps them target you better. But tax data?? Why??
- mikece 3y ago> why would Meta & Google even want your tax data?? The more they know the better of a profile they can build about you which is something they can sell. It's surveillance capitalism, plain and simple.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIs this actually what's happening, or are you just guessing? E.g. if the tax return companies install Hotjar and it starts sending screenshots of tax returns to Hotjar servers, that's not Hotjar trying to grab tax returns.
- JohnFen 3y agoIt's not Hotjar specifically trying to grab tax returns, true, but if Hotjar is using the data sent to it for its own purposes, then it doesn't actually matter if they intended to get tax returns specifically or not. They're still doing wrong.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIs there evidence that Meta used the information?
- JohnFen 3y agoI don't know. But they certainly obtained it, and it would be out of character for Meta not to capitalize on it. I think the assumption they used it is a reasonable one, given their history.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI disagree, especially when half the stories are like this one, and only exist because of all the other stories supporting them, so this one must be true.
- stygiansonic 3y agoIncome level probably important
- oaththrowaway 3y agoThey'd do anything for a sniff of your 3rd grade report card. Of course they want your tax info
- 34679 3y agoAd targeting by income. It wouldn't make sense to advertise luxury vehicles to someone making $30k/year, for example.
- lmkg 3y agoThere are also entire industries that target low income individuals, such as diploma mills and payday loans. I can also imagine specific ads targeted at small business owners, or landlords. Either of those are easy to parse (imprecisely) by the presence of specific forms in the return.
- robertlagrant 3y agoAnd cheaper cars. It's not all negative. It's just different products for different segments. High income earners will get targeted with vanity degrees and ludicrously expensive "experiences".
- DropInIn 3y agoCheaper with higher profit margins, therefore a worse deal....
- thumbuddy 3y agoThey now know what those people can afford, what schemes they might be vulnerable enough to buy into, etc. But also think about combining it with all the other data they have? They can sell that to anyone even the government. So you know how govt agencies can't just go peek at your taxes without a good reason? Google and meta can sell this data to contractors to sleuth on people or do whatever they do because it's technically all private industry. Any peice of data like this is super lucrative.
- RajT88 3y ago> Any peice of data like this is super lucrative. I am currently running an experiment where I have put about 3.5 million USD in a Google Finance portfolio not marked "playground" to see what shakes out of it. I suspect I will find out soon.
- harles 3y agoThere’s no allegation that they actually wanted it or attempted to extract tax data. They have it now, but it seems more like gross negligence rather than some nefarious plot.
- FireBeyond 3y agoI feel that that would be a pretty disingenuous claim on their part. "Oh, no-one at Meta noticed that the payload also included 'what deductions that person was eligible for', or noticed and said 'eh, seems fine to me'?"
- aloe_falsa 3y ago> no-one at Meta noticed that the payload also included 'what deductions that person was eligible for' I wouldn't expect anyone at Meta to actually look at unencrypted user pixel payloads. Seems like an easy way to lose your job.
- kart23 3y agoThink about how many requests pixels are sending to meta every day. Probably billions. I guarantee you nobody is looking at the arbitrary form data from millions of unique urls.
- marketingtech 3y agoThey don't. There is no semantic value to this data for them. To Google and Meta, it's an arbitrary data point. To tax companies, it is data that can utilized to either target the delivery or measure the performance of their own ads. That said, there doesn't need to be semantic value for this to feed into an ML model that ends up associating tax data attributes with other attributes.