Online Tax Filing Sites Probably Illegal
from the oops dept
This just gets better and better. Now that it’s way too late to do anything about it, we’ve already learned that the IRS’s database of information from e-filers is not at all secure — and hasn’t been for years. Now comes the additional news that if you used Intuit’s or H&R Block’s tax filing websites in California, you were probably tracked illegally. It turns out that both sites use a combination of web bugs and cookies to track what you do on their site for the sake of advertising — violating a California law that prohibits tracking and disclosing your actions on an e-tax filing site. Despite the complaints in the article, it doesn’t sound like the companies in question were really doing anything that bad, but anything involving tracking what you do and taxes tends to get people a bit on edge.
