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Tracking Your Taxes
CTealL writes "Apparently Intuit thinks it's okay to share information about taxes with third paries. According to this article,
Intuit is using a third party tracking technology on all tax forms submitted to the IRS. "We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax. The IRS disavows any knowledge of this, saying "The IRS does not take a position on Web tracking tools." Makes you wonder where your tax information is going..."
Paper has nothing on electronics for leaving a trail.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
This is why I wear a tinfoil hat while I do my e-File return.
Are there [i]any[/i] honest companies left who actually care about the end user? The little guy?
A HP48GX and a #2 pencil. Straight into the envelope.
It's slower than an e-file, but far more anonymous, providing you don't put a return address on the envelope.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
"We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax.
But he said Omniture doesn't do this. The reason, he said, is that client companies don't authorize Omniture to do it.
Yes they *can*, but do they? *no*
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Its time to crush this 30 year old unholy alliance between the IRS and the 3 party tax prep companys. The tax system has become like the legal system - a systematic exploitation of the American people to keep an elite in business, in this case IRS agents and retired IRS agents.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Identity theft is really becoming more of institution these days. So much information is out there, so quickly can someone hijack someone's life and such a pain in the ass it is to reclaim it. How much of a problem will this have to become before the laws change and identity is more easily secured? Can this be done without some sort of national privacy-killing registry?
append an md5 sig to the bottom of all your AC posts. :)
You will be the only one who can decode it and confirm its your comment
I'd love to know how this was flamebait.
So, on Slashdot, everyone will complain about the obvious privacy issues of having your personal information given away for marketing purposes. And, that's it. Now, if a Major Media Outlet were to carry this story, say, Reuters, then you would hear about it on NPR, you'd see it on ABC, and you'd read it in the New York Times. And it would be illegal in two months for these assholes to share your personal information while you trust them to do something as simple as file your taxes electronically. Of course, the Reuters author would have to write it up with a pro-consumer spin. It would have to cry privacy violation in every sentence.
"You've just got to trust us," Miller replied, adding that "if we didn't uphold our privacy commitment, we wouldn't be here."
Yeahhh, I'm gonna say no!
Quicken used to be an excellent product around 1997 or so. But then they started adding in-program spam and call home features. And that's when I stopped upgrading.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
What is the privacy policy on Turbo Tax. If they don't disclose they are collecting the information, are users expecting a reasonable degree of privacy when submitting.
*Shrug* Whatever. If you don't want to to deal with it, don't use the product. Don't pay taxes (this is a joke, if you do this your stupid). They probably won't notice you. You could break your network so it doesn't forward out that traffic but silently fails so you can claim you didn't know.
And I thought they learn their lesson with that DRM fiasco (remember that?) Evidently I thought wrong. Of course, Tax Cut as a piece of software seem to suck more with each passing year...
People have no rights anymore because buisnesses stopped thinking about serving you. They now look at aggregates. You have become an after-thought on someones spreadsheet. We have 10,000 customers. We lose 50 this month because they don't like us sharing their information. But we get 500 new accounts from our marketing blitz. The bank is going to say it isn't worth their time to deal with 50 unhappy customers when an advertisment can bring in more customers.
BTW, this is unrelated to this story, but I need help and I have to ask (since all the smart people hang out at slashdot, and I don't know the ipa to any forus to ask). My damn internet connection is not working right. I can't get to yahoo.com, but if i type in the ip address, i get there. What the hell is wrong?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Racist. He's making fun of non-native american Indians and he probably isn't even a minority!
From the article: But he said Omniture doesn't do this. The reason, he said, is that client companies don't authorize Omniture to do it.
So, is he saying that given the opportunity to capture this information, his company would? Semi-distrubing. What about not caputuring this information since it would be wrong to do so? Particulary with recent problems with identity theft.
-
the boxed version? The article doesn't appear to say and I'm not quite sure why "web bugs" would be used to collect data on the boxed version. (y'know, like... when you could just capture the keystrokes?)
The real question lately is, where isn't your tax information going?
if you RTFA, it says they CAN do it, but they DON'T. How is this news?
That would be your DNS. Make sure you've got the right servers registered, in your network settings. There are some public DNS servers out there too, I think. Damn, I'm really replying to this when I don't know what I'm talking about. Of course, that's the danger in asking such an offopic question is such a public forum.
I thought it was a joke about his own sexual depravity. Since that is slashdot that should have been modded redundant or perhaps overrated....
The /. article is totally misleading. Makes it sound like Intuit is actively tracking the actual returns and trying to compile info on the users, not just tracking and compiling the user process. Until there's something shown that the tracking is done beyond the site, I'm gonna reserve judgement.
If you're gonna get the tin hats out for this, then don't forget that Intuit also makes and sells the number one financial tool for not just businesses, but also personal finances. Quicken and Quickbooks. They don't need your tax return information. All your bank accounts are belong to Intuit. If they wanted to track your buying habits, the checking history of hundreds of thousands of individuals is at their fingertips.
I switched to TaxCut when Intuit tried that crap a few years ago writing things in places on the HD that could screw up a Linux install. I had the option again this year and thought, nope, I'm still not happy with them.
So what's in place to keep a dishonest employee from gathering more information than they should and turning around and selling it to ID thieves?
If identity theft is supposed to be as big of a business as we're told, you'd think that getting a few moles inside these companies would be a top priority.
You'd know the person's income, what they purchased, address etc. That data would be worth a fortune to theives, and there's zero legitimate marketing purpose to them having my SS#.
Intuit, and H&R Block both use 3rd party tools to track web site behavior. Big deal.
I work at a Web site development agency, and we use these same tools (Omniture, DoubleClick, WebTrends, etc) to track behavior on our clients' sites. There's no sharing of data, no sinister plots. It's just a tool to understand how (anonymous!) users of the sites behave, what pages are most popular, and where the site has problems (what pages are most frequently abandoned).
The tools are useful, but if a company does abide by its privacy policy (legally binding, I believe), there's no risk of personal information ending up being gathered.
It's another example of a columnist writing an uninformed article, and Slashdot piling on rather than debunking. Gawd.
*OUTRAGE!*K !*I ON*! *
*OUTRAGE!*
*OUTRAGE!*
*TALK!*
*TAL
*TALK!*
*FORGET*
*FORGET*
*FORGET*
*INACT
*INACTION*
*INACTION*
*LATHER*RINSE*REPEAT
*LATHER*RINSE*REPEAT!*
*LATHER*RINSE*REPEAT!*
Important Stuff lameness filter.
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"Julie Miller, an Intuit spokeswoman, said hundreds of thousands of returns are typically submitted daily during the last few days before each year's deadline (which is Friday, for those of you in deep denial).
The company is offering its Free File program at taxfreedom.com. Nowhere on the welcoming screen or at any point in the filing process is it disclosed that Web bugs are being used. "
The implication being this is their "web" client. Not the boxed one.
(Not that my data is anymore safe.. Quicken likes to try to "force" me to upload my savings and checking account information to their website for "my" convenience.)
Maybe if he had mentioned wanting to watch or imagine it.
But it seemed to only be insulting Indians. Which is why its flaimbait. The only way Indians get some is if the rape the goat, err girl, themselves.
At least some states have figured out how to file taxes electronicly and directly (and free!) without involving someone with a profit motive in the mix.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Actually, the IRS position is a smart one. Basically they are saying "Until it gets to us (e-mail or snail mail or whatever) we have no knowledge of it, or its journey, or what happened to it between you and us."
That's fair, damn it.
The issue is with the go-betweens. I say - take 'em to court and smoke 'em.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
He's also the guy who invented Flubber.
Is this only for the people who used the tax preparation software itself, or do those of us who used in good faith their web service to file our taxes, based on a recommendation from the IRS's website, also have a risk of having our identities stolen?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
"The whole purpose of this technology is to hide tracking from consumers. You can't see the Web bugs. You don't know they're there. That's exactly how the direct-marketing industry prefers it -- tracking methods that can't be detected or disabled." God Bless the USS..er I mean USA.
Once I bought a VISA gift card at AAA(that travel place), and they got my social security number and a month or so later I got a freaking cell phone bill in the mail for a phone I didn't even have. Turns out one of the employees there took the number and somehow used it to get a damn cell phone for his friend....I guess you really can't trust anybody.
Good God, you idiot! Now they'll have your DNA!!!
I don't think I care about Third Paries very much. As long as they aren't sharing with third parties I think we are all OK.
I figured it is DNS. I was able to get google, and since I can't connect to any website, I was using their cache. It appears Comcast has some hackers attacking them, they are calling it "pharming". They posion the DNS server. So I guess I am at the mercy of Comcast to fix their DNS server.
I really wish I had a list of IP addresses to the most common domains. So far, using google, I am searching "www.yahoo.com ip address" and then if I see something in the cache with an ip address, i copy and paste it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
They can only get away with this because they haven't been called out on the carpet for it. Single a bank out and make sure all the bloggers get the word. Eventually the news will filter to the MSM that "Bank XYZ" is selling customers' info. Even if they all are doing it, the other banks will get the message that they're next. If the pressure is strong enough, you can get them to change...all it takes is one bank to give in and the rest will follow suit to compete.
You could also take a look at your hosts file - If your run windows it is %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts or on a *nix based OS it is /etc/hosts. The hosts file bypasses normal DNS queries and is sometimes used by spyware/adware to hijack your connections. Try using a product like adaware or another spyware removal tool if you are running windows.
> Makes you wonder where your tax information is
> going...
To the IRS. Via USPS. Only an idiot would file his tax return via the Web.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yup, call your isp and ask em for their list of dns servers, they'll probably have a few. Then stick the ip's in your Network Properties dialog or resolv.conf as the case may be. beh Slashdot Tech Support
with third paries?!?!
But he is a minority - he is white.
All hail the MegaCorps! Protectors of the little guy's privacy!
I think any web surfer with basic internet knowledge knows that servers can tell what pages you visit, of course, they are afterall giving you the information. If most users find this surprising they should know what else goes on.
/., but for anyone that reads this, *your computer is more secure, just because its in the real world doesn't mean it can't happen, and in the computer world there is cryptographically secure prevention*. People steals cars, break into houses, and commit fraud without computers all the time, don't be afraid of your computer, or stuff online.
Can you trust the person sorting your mail not to open it? about as much as you can trust Intuit, however as soon as its online everyone gets freaked out.
As soon as you let someone else transmit your personal information this can happen. When you submit a form containing your SSN (social security number) the person on the recieving end or anyone in transit can read it, be the form HTML or paper.
Anyone sorting real world mail could open a letter and read it. Any company sending your data over the web could read the data you are sending them, well, of course, you're sending it to them for a reason.
Could a marketing company get people to infiltrate the post office and steal random letters to examine content? of course. Could a marketing company forcefully aquire data (via hacking, etc.) online? of course. But now its much harder, the data is encrypted.
Unfourtunatly most average consumers don't read
(For those who are going to attack me because the article isn't about hacking, the only way for the marketing companies to get data is hacking, Intuit is *not* going to share that info. Either a or b is true: a) its against privacy laws, paper or internet. b) they could do it with your paper forms too, making it a moot point.)
It cracks me up, everytime my fellow Americans ramble on about this mark of the beast stuff. Even if ALL Americans did X, there are still BILLIONS of others NOT doing X.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You have comcast and they have their third outage within two weeks. just use 4.2.2.1 as a secondary dns and you are good to go.
The article doesn't come right out and say it, but this is regarding their web-based filing. When I first read the title, I thought that it was for their CD-based package.
The problem is that at least web information can be caught since most of that information is captured and retrieved through cookies. Unfortunately, this article makes me even more suspect about their CD-based software. You know, the one with CD-illa (2003 tax year) that didn't uninstall properly? We can track and delete cookies. We're not so fortunate with their CD version, except to not install the product at all.
Maybe it's time to let TurboTax figure out the math while disconnected from the network, hand-write the results and send them in, then immediately wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. Okay, I'm being facetious with that, but if they're willing to do this sort of thing on the web where we can catch them, what's to stop them from doing it with their binary distributions where catching them in the act might not be so easy?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Wow it's April 15th on Friday, lucky I read Slashdot!
If you are on Comcast, they have been having all sorts of problems with their DNS servers. I helped a friend last night to get a temporary workaround. Luckily, they could still IM, so I could give them instructions typed instead of over the phone. For your network connection (assuming windows, control panel/network connections), select either wired or wireless connection properties (whichever one you are using). Select Internet Protocol TCP/IP in the list box and go to its properties. Change the bottom option to "Use the following DNS server addresses, and enter 4.2.2.1 for preferred and 4.2.2.2 for alternate. These are DNS servers open to public use, run by Verizon, I believe. Click OK to get out of all the boxes and you should be set. You can go through the same steps to select "Obtain DNS server address automatically" when Comcast has fixed their problems.
So nobody pays tax on necessities. From there, the more you buy, the more you pay. It's progressive without having to treat people differently under the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hope a lot of this goes into some statistics that show how overtaxed we are. We being us here Canadians.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
lol, I had to stop at "Federal Alcohol Administration"
This sounds like it should apply to Canada, eh!
Intuit notices that you trade a lot of stock. Merrill-Lynch agrees to pay Intuit .20 for every prospective customer lead given to them and will up it to .30 if they are not already a Merrill customer.
There's lotsa gold in them thar data mines.
CRS/GDS companies like SABRE/Worldspan/Apollo, etc do it all the time now. ( I worked for SABRE as a developer for several years )United Airlines gives SABRE a fee for every lead they give them for customers that have flown into ski resorts. More money per lead if these folks have done it more than one year. If they flew someone besides United, then United sends them a coupon for X% off their next flight to said ski resort destination city.
And who else pays for this data? Why the ski resorts themselves! Look for the trend and if you appear to be an outdoorsy type then maybe Jeep will send you a coupon for a special deal from one of their dealers.
Try changing your DNS server from 'automatically assigned by the ISP' to a manual setting like 4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.4... Won't make Comcast happy ( or I think, Verizon) but should allow you to browse as normal.
Banks make good money selling your financial information to "related buisnesses".
Sorry to burst your bubble. I work closely with dozens of banks and credit unions on this very topic. GLB inspires more neurotic fear in bankers than anything else I have seen in some time.
By the way, "related businness" means sharing information with other companies that must be there to support the bank, like disaster recovery companies, records archiving companies, etc.
Whether or not you believe it, "related businesses" simply cannot use your information for anything other than performing their service for the bank.
The closest a bank can get to profiting from your personal information is using it to offer services. A bank may notice that you have a high credit card balance and offer you a HELOC, it may notice that you have a high savings balance and offer its CDs, it may notice that your car loan is getting paid down and offer a pre-approved loan for a newer car, etc.
Other than that, your information is strictly off limits.
128.210.11.5 (ns.purdue.edu)
128.174.5.6 (ns.uiuc.edu)
You may want to use some closer to you, but these should get you up and running, at least.
...just my 2 gil.
We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site,
blah blah blah
But he said Omniture doesn't do this. The reason, he said, is that client companies don't authorize Omniture to do it.
What they can do and what they do are very different.
Nothing but FUD, move along.
Thank you!!! It worked. I just hope I am not using a server for some porn site in the USSR. lol. Or maybe this is one of those times to not ask why it works.
And if this fix is so easy, why can't comcast get their stuff to work.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
http://givemeliberty.org/
They have no teeth! They never have a court order!
Jan 2005 - "IRS Summonses apply no force to taxpayers, and no consequences can befall a taxpayer who refuses or ignores, or otherwise does not comply with an IRS summons until that summons is backed by a federal court order."
Second Circuit Court of Appeals Schulz v IRS (Case No. 04-0196).
Can they get a court order? That's the point, they have no authority to do anything to you, and have no jursidiction so that is the first thing people will bring up and the case is thrown out!
The problem has been that they didn't give you your day in court so you could ask any simple questions before taking your house!
Read the site and learn!
Yeahhh, I'm gonna say no!
Well, people. It finally happened. Slashdot has been reduced to network-television David Spade style comedy.
I mean, ehm...
Whi chi cha haaaAAAAA! (comedic "ninja-style" pose)
straight from the point of a mechanical pencil to the white boxes on the tax form.
tried doing my taxes on the confuser back before they stopped supporting nt 4.0, and frankly, it took three times as long and wasn't any less enraging.
maybe next year, assuming there is a straight unencumbered download of free software directly from the irs that runs on osX, uses no third party crap whatsoever, doesn't intercommunicate on the web until the encrypted data goes out, and that only to one identified site and port... maybe then.
too many scumpuppies out there pretending to 5el1 v1@gr4 that really want your web cache.....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
And yet their online tax software is awesome. This year I've compared it with TaxCut, and at least TaxCut's online offering can't even touch TurboTax Online. Heck, you can even go through entire TT Online in Firefox! And it spits out a PDF for you in the end. It's more convenient and better thought out. Highly recommended.
And no, I'm not a Quicken user and I don't work for Intuit.
No, as a matter of fact, they're owned by Level 3. I find it hard to believe, though, that such a big company doesn't know enough not to put multiple DNS servers on the same Class 3; one router goes down and they're all toast. It's happened to NanoLimp at least once. Of course, they're only for public use, not for their own customers, so they probably don't care very much.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
You totally rule. :)
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
feel free to traceroute them with the IP
traceroute 123.45.67.89
and that should fix the DNS at your ISP, at least for the moment. until they overflow the buffer memory allotted again, and the older IPs are flushed out.
as for the tax comments... aggregates are truckloads of chunks of rock. rock on.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What it does is ask the server for an image (JPEG or GIF). But this request actually triggers a CGI program on the server side, passing it a unique session identifier that was served in the original page. The CGI app on Intuit's side most likely relays the request to the tracking company's server for logging. Cute, huh?
Since I'm not a customer, I didn't go past the login page. But it would be interesting to examine the analytics code served up in the account management pages - perhaps they pass not only the session identifier, but form values as well. (The analytics script could be triggered after the user hits the submit button, for instance). This may have been the point Omniture's CEO was making when he said that he could get customer's SSNs and salary data if he wanted to. Hopefully, there is a negotiation between Intuit and the web analytics firm about what customer information will be tracked, and procedures in place to verify that the analytics portion of the HTML does not collect more information than agreed upon.
Maybe someone with an account at Intuit should take a closer look at the page sources to see what parameters are being passed to the analytics server while you're managing your money.
Dissemination of your personal information without EXPLICIT voluntary consent is clearly against the law. I hope someone is smart enough and will sue the hell out of them.
Have there been any studies of tax data using a supercomputer?
;there is a point in there somewhere. :P
You could use it to predict just how much you can suck out of a system, without killing it too quickly. That way the host is efficiently milked.
The perfect parasitoid.
Parasitic wasp grubs are a good example.
After a caterpillar is paralyzed by a sting, the grubs eat less-important organs first. Vital organs are saved for the last supper.
I've never used Intuit's products, but I've hated them since the mid-90s when they made a corporate decision, under the leadership of Bill Campbell, to blow off their Mac user base. "Want new features? Use Windows." Punks. So I guess it's not really surprising that they're screwing over their current customer base like this.
For some reason Apple decided to put Campbell on its board of directors, despite his demonstrated inimicality (yes, that's a word). I own a fair amount of AAPL, and every year I mark my proxy to withhold my votes for that SOB. Sadly, he keeps getting re-elected. Oh well.
Thanks for listening.
I *do* read most of my privacy notices, and you have the opportunity to opt-out of most marketing-related information sharing... at least with scrupulous businesses. If there is no opt-out mentioned in the privacy notice (it doesn't have to be obvious or easy), then they adhere to a more strict set of guidelines (supposedly).
From what I've read and gathered, the law forbids sharing information in certain ways without offering an opt-out. You do NOT have a choice about them sharing info in ways necessary to provide you the service you've signed up for.
Of course, this doesn't apply to the government. Buy a house, and it's a matter of public record. You suddenly get loan offers out the wazoo. At least you can reduce credit card offers when you tell the credit agencies to not share your credit-worthiness. Do it here . Scroll to the bottom for opt-out, the rest is good info on your rights.
The IRS is now outsourcing tax debt collection to regular collection corporations. Last time they piloted this program, it lost the government money. Imagine how much more this will lose, when some of our most confidential info gets "lost" into the blackhatsphere.
--
make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Tax freedom day in Canada isn't until the end of June.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
And here I thought the Inuit did nothing but sit around getting drunk and contemplate suicide due to their way of life fading out. Well, that and make up new words for snow.
Yeah I watch SeaLab.
Just use Firefox for all of your web browsing and most of your privacy issues will go away. In FF, just go into your preferences/options under security -> cookies and set that to "ask me everytime" and your good to go.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
To answer your unrelated question: Comcast has been having major DNS issues. If you have another DNS server you can use, try using it. People on another forum were giving out DNS server IPs that supposedly were verizon's (they said Comcast made a deal to share DNS so that Comcast wouldn't be badly fucked).
This is why I filled out my 1040.... shedules A,B, and D with Paper and Pencil. Besides, if you're paying about $30.00 for the software after rebates, I figure, I just made about $25.00/hour to do it by hand ;-)
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
I dropped Microsoft in favor of Linux when Microsoft imposed product activation.
I dropped Valve -- did not and will not buy Half Life 2 -- after they imposed product activation.
I dropped Intuit/Turbo Tax when they imposed product activation. Been using Tax Cut ever since.
Once you become a customer-fucking company, you lose me as a customer, and I NEVER come back
I don't know what you've been smokin' dude, but there are no federal laws in the US that establish ownership of an individual's personal information. If you willingly give it to another party, or if it is made public in any way, they are free to do whatever they want with it unless they have committed to you in some legally-enforceable way that they will restrict its use.
my god
I was just looking around at some comments when OUT OF THE BLUE I HEAR THIS ENORRMOUSLY LOUD HONKING SOUND and I just about have a heart attack.
Slashdot, please, for the love of ZOD, remove that ad! Thank you.
OK, google gives zero hits on "flspsed"
Same for freshmeat, sourceforge, and in packages.debian.org
Care to provide a link?
Since I'm self-employed, nobody withholds from me, so I get to feel it when I write my two checks to Fed and State treasuries.
You've got to pay taxes either way--why make yourself feel bad about it? The less I have to think about it, the better. And given current interest rates, it's not like you are losing a lot of money.
Your point is valid and well supported - I grant you that. But how long until these things are tracked, without our knowledge or consent?
Oh come on. I havn't even seen an add in about a year, 'cept for a couple of artful inline reggy adds.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
I mean, two years ago they lost something like 60% of their market share over that 'activation' fiasco...Now THIS???!!! Does this company have a death wish??
Yes, it's a good thing that banks *always* obey the law, especially when it's inconvenient or unprofitable to do so.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
>I'm dead serious
Be careful. The information on that site is incomplete and clearly slanted to try to make the case from various angles that have been tried by tax protestors for years. They lose, because there are many more arguments, and more cogent and legally valid ones, than the "31" listed on your site.
> Show me where you think the law is
The law is in the Code of Federal Regulations, just like all other laws promulgated by Federal Agencies, with updates published in the Federal Register. This authority comes from Congress, which empowers them by delegating lawmaking authority to the agencies.
Don't stake your future or your assets on assumptions that come from this same, tired, *losing* tax protestor line.
Smokescreen and no substance? It has as much weight as anything else done under the authority of Congress. Don't like the tax status quo? Get organized on a national scale and elect representatives who believe as you do, and send them to DC. That, fortunately or unfortunately, is the solution.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
http://www.ecademix.com/JohannesHofmann/#flpsed/
national sales tax, VAT, whatever you call it... it really screws the lower income folks to the point of just dropping out altogether. hurts the middle income folks. the big cigars will still bitch.
no, either a fully flat income tax with a circuit-breaker for those who don't make the poverty line already... or a steeper progressive income tax so the big cigars start paying something to the government, and not to their tax attorneys... are the ways to reform the system.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So how come when I got a high paying job I suddenly started getting letters from AMEX offering me a gold credit card when I have never done business with AMEX in my life and they were totally uninterested in me as a struggling student working a bunch of low paying jobs?
At least you can save your filled in f1040 if you use Acroread! If it's California's f540, you can't. It's a major pain in the butt. You can't save an edited form, but you can print it or reset it... or save a new blank form. But you can't save a form with any fields filled out. Some clown in Sacramento had to deliberately remove this functionality. It makes no sense. At least I have two ounces of savvy and printed it to a pdf file, but there's a lot of people out there that don't that will be severly discombobulated by this nutnumbing idea.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It's not like taxableincome.net didn't already make taxes a thing of the past as we currently allow to continue -- or Intuit were ALREADY a parasite business before selling information. Couldn't be THAT.
//de ~ 9cimi
Indeed. Who besides you and your bank could possibly know that you now had an employer giving you a much larger paycheck?
Oh, wait...
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In case anyone hasn't answered this for you. Your resolution issue (failure to resolve names) comes from a DNS issues. Call your ISP and check thier DNS information, then double check that against your DNS server settings. Your ISP should be able to help you with this.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Your assuming that they got that info from the bank. All itmeans is that SOMEWHERE, something change that said to them you might be worth checking out. There are millions of bits of infomation that are tracked about you and even more if you have money and spend it. People watch people that spend money.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Let me guess.. you have comcast. change your dns server to manual setup.
NS.Bufalo.edu 128.205.1.2
NS.UNC.EDU 152.2.21.1
NS2.UNC.EDU 152.2.253.100
ns.localnet.com 207.251.201.11
Always memorize 1 stable Name server. I still remeber locanet's
I e-filed in mid-February, and got my refunds less than 2 weeks later (federal was actually within a week). I had all my rebates from Intuit before the end of February, including the federal e-file rebate.
I didn't get charged for filing either the state or federal returns until after the 1st of April. That's right, I had my rebate and my refunds for over a month before I got the actual charges for e-filing. So much for tracking my refunds to determine when to ding me.
By they way, total cost for TurboTax Deluxe, State, and Quicken Deluxe, after all rebates (Costco and Intuit), and including the $15 to file my state taxes as well as the sales tax on the original sales price of the software?
$28.
Merde, il pleut encore!
Not if Comcast DNS is working but suffering from cache poisoning. Secondary DNS will only help if Comcast fails to return an answer. Secondary DNS won't help a bit if Comcast actually returns a fraudulent one.
Just make 4.2.2.x your primary and be done with it.
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
In Norway, the goverment provides a web-page where anyone can enter a persons name, city and aproximate age, and retrieve infrormation about the persons income and taxes for the last year. The argument is that this is supposed to prevent corruption. For some reasone information about debt is not official, only fortune. Example (page in norwegian): http://www.sol.no/okonomi/skatt/
> My damn internet connection is not working right.
/etc/resolv.conf (or
> I can't get to yahoo.com, but if i type in the ip
> address, i get there. What the hell is wrong
I have had Comcast do this to me many times, their DNS gateway would sporadically not resolve some IPs.
Use a public DNS server in
"network connections" -> properties -> TCP/IP), or
a DNS server from some other ISP (Eg: 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.1)
Charles Schwab's interactive trading website also contains web-bugs by DoubleClick.
"Now this"? Care to explain what they actually did wrong this time - use cookies?
Republicans do it far more often then democrats, but that is only because most democrats are dirt poor.
This has GOT to be the most ignorant statement I've read in a looonng time. Seriously, just name me ONE politition in office that is dirt poor. Hint: You can't because because a "poor politition" is an oxymoron.
Life is not for the lazy.
How do stories like this get approved?
Web "bugs" just let a server know that a graphic has been downloaded. They don't capture "tax data" or any other data.
Admittedly, the executive giving the interview is a little carried away with himself and his ability to "do whatever we want". "You'll just have to trust us." What bullshit.
Most people I know block third party cookies. If you don't trust Intuit, don't do your taxes online.
I'm getting tired of the "we're so oppressed; look what they're doing to us now" political correctness on Slashdot. Grow up.
...I printed and mailed in my tax return.
Not to Intuit.
It's been a few years since I stopped using their products. This is just another item on my list of reasons not to go back.
Of course, I can't say with any certainty that the TaxAct folks aren't doing something similar. I can only hope that they realize I'm voting with my wallet for a company that doesn't behave that way.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I guess you need to read the fine print on what those company's can do with your info
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
I have implemented this tool on other sites. By default it does not collect this type of information, and nothing personally identifying at that. All it does is collect information about where in the site you are and pass it on to a remote server. So if indeed they are collecting this information (and I see nothing in their config files that indicate this) then Intuit's web dev team would have had to have set it up to do so.
That's what I don't get. If the IRS wanted to actually improve all around, they would enable online filing through their own web site and not require any third party software or services to electronically file taxes.
It could (should?) be as basic as a 1040 long form that does the math between boxes and has instructions along the side. It doesn't have to be like TurboTax or any other third-party application that coaches deductions, etc.
What I want to know is how much lobbying the tax software people have done to keep this from actually happening. I may gripe about my tax amounts, but it really frosts me if I'm required to pay taxes AND to pay some third party to get them paid.
Set up your own DNS server and bounce the requests off the root. This is what I do, and very, very rarely do I have a DNS problem. (For the purists out there who complain that I'm abusing the root DNS servers, shove it.)
Well, I don't know much about TaxAct, but if they are offering software to the public for free, then how do they make their own living? Could there be a motivation inside there to capture and use peoples information in a similar way to what this article is complaining about? A direct federal tax entry system would bypass that issue. It's not just aboutthe fees. That's just adding insult to injury.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
The IRS? HAHAHAHA! The IRS has so badly mismanaged their IT projects that they're generally recognized as the worst of the bad government contract managers. Their old data system is barely limping along but after spending tens of millions they're no closer to a working replacement than they were two years ago.
Here's one example there are many, many more.
We can all breath a giant sigh of relief if they get the new main system online before the old one throws in the electronic towel. Any time you ask anyone in the IRS group how things are going, you'll always get the Air Force salute (shoulder shrug) in response.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The IRS already sells your tax return to anyone who has you SSN. What do you think ChoicePoint does? Any time you apply for a job, a loan or rent an apartment you are authorizing ChoicePoint to pull copies of your tax return. See http://www.4ustax.net/WhyVerify.htm for a candid explanation of the verification business model.
Look for a small privately-held local bank or credit union in your nearest mid-sized city. These institutions are governed by the same laws and regulations as the big banks and yet tend to be focused on their customers in a way that big banks just can't seem to get. Selling your information would be an unthinkable breach of trust.
They're out there. You just need to do some research.
steampunk web design
Excellent reply.
More than just state to state, in many states, there are distinct differences county by county. I was born and raised in Western New York State. The fact that NYC even exists on the same planet, let alone in the same state, is mind bending. Of course, I thought I grew up in a rural area, then I drove all the way across America on route 80. Half way across Wyoming you start to think "Oh, now this is rural....".
Also, I have spent time in Europe, and if you ignore the language differences (which is hard) then you see the same basic differences. Metz France is as different from Paris as Minneapolis is from NYC. Germany is as different from Sweden as Georgia is from New York.
So get over it.....
(BTW Minnesota is more like Sweden than France is.)
Would you say that all people who make broad generalizations are idiots? ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
According to the IRS, all those 3rd parties are free (including TurboTax) if you come from the IRS free-file page.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Assuming you are running windows....
Either your DNS is screwed up, or you have been infected by Malware. Use windows update to apply all the latest security patches. Run your anitvirus scans, run adaware, run spybot search & destroy. Reboot your system, then run adaware and spybot search and destroy again just to be sure.
If the problem persists, don't give up. Web search for stories of people who have experienced similar problems.
Of course there is always the nuclear option. Burn your data to CD and buy a new computer.
Someone could scrunch tax/account info from your computer disk as well as the web. I've been able to decompile some infor out of turbotax files using simple utilities like the UNIX strings and od programs. I dont know how vulnerable other tax programs are.
The summary makes it sound like Intuit is the only one doing this. When you RTFA, however, you find out that H&R Block's online product does the same thing:
Why single out Intuit for bashing in the summary and leave Block un-named?
(Full disclosure: I was a happy customer of Block's tax-filing products for six years until I tried their Web tax software for the first time this year. It's borked in ways a lot more comprehensive than this. I wrote it up on my blog if you care about such things...)
Read my blog.
I'm not a zealot, but it takes an awful lot to convince me to use a product which doesn't support my OS of choice -- Linux. The usability and ease of TurboTax won me over. It's obvious they have spent tons of money and hired some really good UI designers. The entire product is aimed at making the customer comfortable.
When I finished my taxes, I got a pop-up asking me to take their user survey. After a brief moment of thinking "ewww... a pop-up" I decided to to take it because it might be good place to drop a hint about supporting Firefox, etc... Generally I try to take feedback surveys if I have time.
The contrast between the well thought out design of the actual app and the absolutely horrible design of the survey was astounding! Endless pages of "Rate on a scale of 1 to 10 ... 1 being not at all, 10 being extremely important" I didn't count, but I got through at least five pages of 15 or so questions each before I bailed out. The worst part was the questions were stupid. I understand the need for baseline questions, but there were tons of questions like "how important is it the program does math correctly?"
It seems that the actual tax application is a wonderful, well-designed, user-centeric application. On the other hand, the company surrounding it seems to not respect or understand their customers at all. (See the DRM-like fiasco a few year back)
All of the hassle associated with income tax could be eliminated if we went to the flat federal sales tax the Bush has been talking about.
Shouldn't the Privacy Act protect people against this? Knowing how unsecure web transactions can be is the exact reason I take my taxes to a CPA for perperation and filing. It may cost twice as much, but at least they don't sell my personal information.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
I used H&R Block's TaxCut program and used the e-mail address of taxcut@. I moved to a different state and bought something at the Things Remembered store in the mall. Later, I get an e-mail to taxcut@:
Thanks for shopping a Things Remembered in Apache Mall....
It turns out that H&R Block sold my information to a third party to track me. Things Remembered also used the same third party. So the third party just put the pieces together (and tracked my move) and gave my H&R Block e-mail to Things Remembered.
Con as in anti, not Con as in confidence man. :)
My state (VA) also allows me to file taxes directly through them, and I think that's basically a better alternative. (Having written tax software myself long ago, I know it's not exactly brain surgery.) However, I found the process (slightly) less intuitive than the 3rd party site I used to file my federal taxes. That comes from the benefit of competition, IMO. I do agree that the downside of the 3rd party is that one more party has my personal information than needs it. Luckily for me, as a grad student, if my income information gets leaked out, I'll actually get less spam. ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Intuit's privacy statement.
While I understand these restrictions are supposed to be in place. Can some one tell me why I keep getting mail from insurance companies offering me insurance to pay off my mortgage if I lose my job, get injured, etc. There mailings include the mortgage loan ammount ! I pretty sure they had to get it from the bank.
Think Deeply.
Perhaps the parent poster knows this. But this is for the benefit of anyone who didn't. Please help stamp out that bogus meme! http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_marie_ant oinette.htm
http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxletthe.htm l
if the national sales tax plan has one major flaw, it's that it fails to distinguish between the $ that people have already paid tax on, in the transisiton.
If I have accumulated $1million in tax paid savings and neighbor has accumulated $1million in tax deferred savings, the national sales tax SCREWS ME!
How?
I'm gonna hae to pay tax all over again on my savings!
If I get a check for ths tax I'll have to pay when I spend my tax paid savings, then I'm on board.
This will never fly because class warfare leaders will say that my savings are either:
1)ill gotten gains
2)a result of my more 'fortunate' circumstance
3)money I took out of circulation, therefore harmoing the economy(senseless as this is, they'll say it)
They will not notice that I've done all my shopping at thrift stores, never owned a new car, do all my own repairs(home and auto), and cach or kill much of my dietary protein.
Folks like me are only a percent or so of the population, but we'll be one fuvking angry and armed percent if this shit goesdown in a way that taxes us twice. The Boston tea party will look liek a fucking well....tea party.
When the envelope those mortgage insurance offers arrive in has the Bank's name, logo and address on it ... THEN I THINK EVEN A MORON KOWS THEY GOT THE INFO FROM THE BANK.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Through the USPS, which *does* take a rather strong position on the subject of people spying on others' private business.
... include the mortgage loan ammount ! I pretty sure they had to get it from the bank.
Actually I think this information is available from other places, like your credit report, and public info relating to the sale of the home, etc. I mean, maybe they got it from the bank, but you'd be surprised about the other places this could have come from.
JWall: GUI client for IPTables
I was able to do my state tax forms (which didn't grant me "rights" to save changes) by opening it in gv, saving the individual pages to separate .pdf files, converting them to .ps files with pdftops (don't use pdf2ps, it's crap), then importing that into Scribus. It has a nice WYSIWYG environment to do your editing.
---
I am fully aware of several popular programs trying to collect data from people. In order to avoid that, I installed "LittleSnitch" on my Mac box. This is basically a firewall wrapper that tells you whenever a program is trying to make an outgoing connection. Little bastard works well for me.
TurboTax products worked just fine on my Mac and I haven't noticed any outgoing connections so far. Although I compute taxes via software, I always file the myself through good old snail mail.
So nobody pays tax on necessities.
Pardon me if I don't trust the people who are deciding what's a necessity and what's not. After all, if I read the Canadian example correctly, _they_ wound up deciding that a dozen doughnuts was an essential, but that a roll of toilet paper was not. Goodness only knows what might happen if the U.S. Congress made such a list.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I happen to be the programmer for the servers that manage transmitting millions of tax returns to the IRS and other agencies for a tax software company (not Intuit). If this article is true, then Intuit is facing some charges, unless my understanding of the law is wildly wrong. Any time you have an SSN combined with any other piece of identifying info; an address, a name, even just a zip code, then that data automatically falls under federal privacy acts, and disclosing the info or allowing it to be disclosed through negligence is a felony.
We don't let tax return data be viewed by anyone unless the preparer gives permission, usually due to some problem with the return that we are helping them sort out.
if you can ping google.com (not the ip address, the hostname) then it is likely your hosts file is messed up. otherwise, it is your dns settings or your dns server.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
There are a ton of Canopy Group companies in that area and although I can't find info on their site associating them with the Canopy Group I wouldn't doubt that it is. It sounds like the sleazy kind of company that Canopy would own.
I certainly don't trust any Canopy Group company.
In the growing list of reasons NOT to use their software.
I have used TT for the Web for the last 4 years, this year, I switched. I was SO uncertain about my forms and what was being displayed and how things were entered that I went over my 1040 EZ (EZ, as in, you know, EASY) FOUR times and it still didnt look right (at one point it even showed my AGI as being more than my total income!).
I spend all that time, finally went to file, and even though the front page said "$9.95 for federal" with a vague mention of extra fees for state I get to the price and its $29.95 for fed. anf $39.95 for state....where the hell did that come from?
I looked on their forums and GOBS of people were going on about how they were ripped off by Intuit.
I went to H&R Blocks TaxCut web based service, it actually had specific impossible to miss sections for entering forms 1099-INT and 1099-G (unemployment) and not only was I more satisfied that it was done properly, I also went from getting $6 from fed and owing $190 to state I am getting back a total of $287 between the two with the taxcut method (still less than I expected but sounds better, no way I owed, and I was more comfortable with what was entered and how that I trust it more than Intuits numbers).
AVOID TURBOTAX LIKE THE PLAGUE!
Between the ever-decreasing quality of their software, the crap they pull with activation (or tried to), the shady crap going on with their prices and now this....just run, dont walk, away from them!
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
I mean, anyone in the US postal system could open your return and get all the information. Or, anyone in the IRS could misuse all the information?
The people at the IRS who process your return are every bit as much minimum-wage slaves as anyone at Intuit or H&R Block, or the barista at Starbucks who runs your credit card through.
Why not deliver your taxes to the IRS in person, in a suitcase full of unmarked $20 bills. THAT will certainly seem anonymous to them, oh yeah.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
On the other hand, with electronic theft, I can spend a lot of my theft time programming something to recognize and capture those SSNs. It takes only a little more effort to steal thousands of numbers than it does to steal 50. Furthermore, I don't have to be in any one physical location. Even if my program has to run on a specific server, I can program it, go on vacation, and collect the harvest when I get back.
Now look at the damage potiential. Because I can only open so many envelopes in a day, I am very limited to how much damage I can cause. If I enlist the help of others, I can do more damage, but I have to share some of the spoils. Electronically, I can work alone, minimizing my investment, and harvest more numbers, maximizing my returns.
You can obviously see the attraction for electronically capturing or even stealing data. That is why it gets more attention than the paper or hand methods. Yes, we have always had people that could steal or capture personal data for theft or marketing. But because it is easier to do it electronically, it is more attractive and therefore more prevelant.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Develop a standard form for evaluating new tax proposals. Use as a model the
Considerations:
tax where the money is -- those without money cannot pay
avoid overly impeding the flow of resources towards efficient uses
don't take so much from anyone that they cannot live adequately
provide sufficient tax revenue (completion of Introduction to Spending Policy 360 is suggested, though not required)
keep it simple -- to minimize illegal avoidance, cost of collection, and general confusion
provide steady revenue under all economic conditions to extent possible
objective results will determine more of your grade than subjective "fairness"
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
The only problem I have with it is that most of them try to disguise the mailings as though they're coming from your lender (by printing the lender's name in prominent positions, and leaving their own name in the Fine Print).
Practically all of these offers I've ever gotten are from companies who are entirely unaffiliated with my credit union (they even say so in the Fine Print).
First onerous DRM with Quicken and TurboTax. Now this. That's why I use H&R Block's TaxCut. They haven't (yet) pulled this kind of shit.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I tend to strongly object. I've noticed that the Eastern European bloc tends to be THE WORST capitalists out there.
My extensive working with a substantial amount of Eastern bloc Europeans has taught me a few things...
1) they like to make $$ more than the avg American
2) they have NO respect for laws in general and view laws as something that needs to be proven broken before they will admit to it being broken
3) they are the cheapest bastards that I've EVER met.
So if generalizations are the order of the day then I've got my own.
It's not to hard to imagine where this ideology of theirs come from. Being poor leads to people doing whatever it takes to make a living and breaking the laws becomes the norm. Come over to the US and continue leads to unnecessary screwing of people for $$.
where does my experience come from?
My uncle owns a HUGE garage and over the past 20 yrs he's rented it out to immigrants from that region of the world and over the past 20 yrs there have been about 2 of 50 that had "somewhat" of morals.
The worst offender was this Russian dude that lives with his parents, has 20 cars in their yard, doesn't pay rent, doesn't chip in for food, and plans on selling about 100 cars and retiring on some island - by himself or with a girlfriend - NOTE: No parents included. If you're willing to screw your parents then there are NO boundaries at all.
Intuit's software is constantly trying to get through Zonealarm to call home, why does it suprise ANYONE that they feel entitled to rape your privacy in another way?
Screw you, Intuit. You could have been the premier taxfiling software and been happy, but instead you chose the path of maximum suck.
-Styopa
A refinance action should not be public record, because the realestate did not change hands. Companies are supposed to have your permission to check your credit. Still the data is getting out there some how!
Think Deeply.
Actually, I suspect Adobe. Saving filled-in forms was not possible in Acrobat Reader 5 - only the full version of Acrobat. Acrobat 7 does give you the "right" to save filled-in documents. I'm betting "rights management" is a new and or extra-cost feature of the program used to create the PDF files. The Feds have gotten around to updating their PDF-producing software, but California hasn't.
The concept of being allowed to print but not save a document is the kind of insanity typical of DRM-obsessed companies, of which it appears Adobe is one. Hopefully there will be a Free Software fix for this idiocy.
Yeah, because a networking company like Level3 would never think of having network redundancy on their core /24.