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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..."
No.. the true moral of the story is.. American corporate greed knows no bounds...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
shorten it to greed and you got it right. Americans are no worse than other humans.
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.
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.
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.
Except, all they do is function to collect what the tax code says they should. Don't like it? You have to change the law. Fix it in congress, thus treating the problem, not the symptom.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
The problem with a national sales tax is that middle to low income earners spend a larger percentage of their earnings. Upper class earners spend a much smaller percentage of their wages. A national sales tax would hurt low wage earners the most as they would be using the majority of their wages on food & basic necessities. The little $ they might have left after their purchases and their tax burden won't be enough for an adequate savings.
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.)
Progressive tax, by definition, is a tax the has different rates based on total income. Thus, a sales tax is not progressive. It's a regressive tax.
A regressive tax, in contrast, is a tax that takes a larger percentage of the income of low-income people than of high-income people.
Example: If I make $1,000,000 a year, and you make $75,000. If we both spend $75,000 on however we define sales, we both have to pay the same in taxes. You are being taxed on 100% of your income. I am being taxed on only .075% of mine.
While a regressive tax such as this one that is focused on consumption has benefits, it does not help address income inequities or have any built in system that recognizes the responsibility of people in fortunate circumstnaces have to the larger society and for people not as well off as they are - such as those that make below the poverty line.
Surely you realize that when you try to ascribe any characteristic to a couple hundred million people, you're going way out on a limb?
I could just as well say that Europeans have nasty tendency to lump people together into groups.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."