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..."

Comments

Read the fine print for your savings and checking

[John Seminal]

They already share your information, and it is done by your bank. Banks make good money selling your financial information to "related buisnesses". And there is no way to opt-out. Don't want to have us sell your social security number and financial data? Then we won't open a savings account for you. What can you do? Stuff your mattress with money?

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?

And here's a possible scenario....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

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.

Re:National sales tax now

[Jacked]

The tax system now is (mostly) fair. Everyone pays a % of their earnings.

Hardly. Not everyone pays a percentage. Almost half the workers in the U.S. pay no income tax at all. And, in fact, they get quite a sweetheart deal -- many of those people get a "refund" which is far larger than the amount that was witheld in the first place (refundable credits).

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.

It's been my experience that most upper class earners spend virtually everything they earn. They might spend a slightly smaller amount as a percentage of their income, but, 85% of $200,000 is a lot more real dollars than 95% of $25,000. Admittedly, I pulled those numbers out of my ass, they're just for illustration purposes ;)

As structured in H.R. 25, everyone gets a monthly check to prevent exactly what you describe. It's actually a pretty well thought-out plan. You can read more about it at http://fairtax.org/.

Yawn!!!

[AstroDrabb]

This is total media hype. This whole thing is just about some cookies to track web usage. No big deal. I filed my taxes this year on-line with Intuit using Firefox (under Linux, even though TurboTax said I wasn't using a supported OS. I changed the UA to Firefox WinXP and TurboTax didn't complain again). Under my Firefox preferences, I set my cookie options to "ask me every time". This way, the first time a site/servername tries to set a cookie, Firefox prompts me and I can tell Firefox to "always accept" or "never accept". When I did my taxes with Intuit, I noticed non-turbo tax cookies trying to be set. I just told Firefoxt to "always deny" those cookies and to "always allow" the cookies from turbotax. I had no problems doing my taxes after that with TurboTax online.

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.

Re:The morality of the story:

[jonatha]

>>But yeah, the target is to owe $999 at the end

>Huh? Why?

Owing (rather than getting a refund) means you can earn interest on the money for a year rather than letting Uncle Sam have it.

$999 is the most you can owe without having to pay penalties and interest for underpayment.