Another Data Mining Cautionary Tale

 Over at The Verge, a story copublished with The Markup reveals that Facebook was looking over millions of our shoulders as we prepared our taxes.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned.

The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.

So, yikes.

Even when some of the information was obscured, there was enough included that Facebook could match up the tax info to the Facebook profile, giving Meta a collection of particular sensitive and personal data.

Remember this story the next time your school district is talking about whatever cool new computer program they are plugging all of the students into, and what sort of data is being collected. Not even the various parties involved seem to have fully grasped what information was being passed around by the pixel that is largely about collecting a record of where you've been and what you've done and passing it on.

This stuff gets complicated. Read Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism to get just a taste of how intertwined ad software has become. One new one on me-- an online advertiser can contract to advertise to widget.com customers by setting ads to target "people who regularly visit widget.com" and thereby avoid paying widget.com's advertising prices. 

Schools are data goldmines, and every piece of software that gets inside the schoolhouse door is looking for nuggets, and sometimes nobody really knows how much is being mined and where it will end up. If your district is not prioritizing data security, you have a problem.