Mark Zuckerberg may have your tax return information, thanks to a deal with H&R Block, TaxSlayer, and TaxAct.

We learned this through a Senate Democrat Report released today.

A new congressional report shows H&R Block, TaxSlayer and TaxAct gave tens of millions of people's personal financial information to tech companies. Now, senators are calling for criminal charges. https://t.co/00d2lC4byd

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 12, 2023

I bet you didn’t know that was even legal, and quite possibly it wasn’t.

I am not in the habit of singing the praises of liberal Democrats, particularly not those of Elizabeth Warren, but we must give credit where credit is due. And a lot of credit is due to the Democrats on this one. Kudos!

About 10 million people type their personal financial information into H&R Block, TaxSlayer and TaxAct websites every year to prepare their taxes, trusting the companies to keep their information safe. Instead, the companies shared that personal information with Google and Facebook, some going as far back as 2011, members of Congress wrote in a new report.

The congressional investigation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), follows a report last year about such data-sharing with Facebook by the technology journalism website The Markup. Warren and six other lawmakers wrote to the Justice Department on Tuesday urging criminal charges against the companies for violating laws that prevent tax preparers from sharing their clients’ personal information.

For God’s sake, man, it’s bad enough that the government gets to pry into your income and expenses. The last thing we need is Big Tech getting its hands on what we make and how we spend our money. Don’t they know enough about us already?

No. No, they don’t. Social media makes outrageous sums of money by learning everything they can about us and selling that information to others.

H&R Block said it has changed its practices. “H&R Block takes protecting our clients’ privacy very seriously, and we have taken steps to prevent the sharing of information via pixels,” the company said in a statement. TaxAct and TaxSlayer did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Post about the congressional report.

The congressional report found that some of the customers affected by the data sharing were using a free version of TaxAct that the company offers in conjunction with the IRS to help low-income filers fill out their tax returns.

The three companies tracked the information that users typed into their tax preparation websites using pixels, a common technology utilized on almost all websites for customer ad targeting on social media. Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, offer this tracking technology to website administrators. When users typed their information into the tax forms, the report says, pixel technology sent that data to Google and Facebook — including users’ approximate annual gross income, the amount of money they received as a tax refund, whether they are married and have children, and whether they ever clicked on a long list of tax forms that would reveal more about their income and life events.

We now live in a dystopia where the people at the top of the food chain get to know everything about everybody else, and we are expected to thank them for giving us access to platforms where we can bitch about that and also, coincidentally, show pictures of our food.

Get into anything a bit less congenial to their interests, though, and they will ban either the content or even kick you off.

Why do we put up with this?

One reason, it seems, is that we interact with real human beings face to face at an ever-decreasing rate, so social media has become a substitute for real life. Our lives are, ironically, Meta–which is why Facebook changed its name to Meta.

We all get to feel “connected” to each other while simultaneously seeing people in the real world less and less. It is easy, and for a few, it has become a way to make zillions of dollars.

Yet the metaverse is really quite dystopian. It warps our minds and our perceptions of each other. People are nastier on the web, lose the ability to sense or believe in nuance, and the only people who benefit are the people who accumulate and manipulate the data. They can shape attitudes and buying habits, create social conflicts, and with the money they make buy off the politicians to keep the grift going.

We have known for years that Instagram makes teens feel worse about themselves, yet nothing is done. We know that Google manipulates the news, yet nothing is done. We know that TikTok is a Chinese spy app that creates social contagions, yet nothing is done.

And we know that all social media companies collaborate with the government to censor the speech of Americans and distort the truth, and nothing is done.

These companies make America and Americans worse.

This is why Elizabeth Warren deserves real praise on this one, because in this case Meta and the tax companies may have gone a step too far by breaking the law.

Of course, if the only result is a large fine, Meta will shrug it off as the cost of doing business. If Congress actually gets off its collective butt and uses this as a spur to break them up, it might make a difference.

Let’s hope for the latter, but expect the former.

Also expect me to find an excuse to criticize Elizabeth Warren soon. I feel a bit unclean.