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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..."
"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.
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
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.
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.