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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.
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-- W.C. Fields
"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.
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."
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 would love to, but there's this little problem that brings up later in the process... :P
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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.
Good God, you idiot! Now they'll have your DNA!!!
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.)
Wow it's April 15th on Friday, lucky I read Slashdot!
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
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.
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.
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/.
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
Would you say that all people who make broad generalizations are idiots? ;)
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