Popular tax filing firms and software like TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block secretly share their users' sensitive financial information with Facebook's parent company Meta, according to a study by The Markup. User information is collected and sent with Meta's Pixel (Meta Pixel) code. Before we get into the details, the tool called Meta Pixel or Pixel is essentially a piece of code offered by Meta for free and allows you to measure how effective your ads are by watching what people are doing on your site.

Research by The Markup found that popular tax firms such as TaxAct, TaxSlayer and H&R Block are running the Meta Pixel code on their websites. In fact, there is no problem in using this code. The main problem is that this code collects information that it shouldn't collect and sends it to Meta. Pixel code collects sensitive financial information such as income information, payment amounts, as well as information such as name and e-mail from these sites. The report also states that even if you don't have a Facebook account, Facebook can use this data to power its own advertising algorithms with incoming information.

A Meta spokesperson said: “Advertisers should not submit sensitive information about people through our business Tools. It is against our policies to do so, and we train advertisers to set up their business tools correctly to prevent this from happening. Our system is designed to filter out any potentially sensitive data it can detect.” said. After the incident was revealed, tax filing firms changed the Pixel code in their systems to ensure that this information was not collected and sent to Meta. As you may recall, earlier this year, Meta faced two class-action lawsuits again due to the Pixel code. It was revealed that the Pixel tool was collecting hospital and patient data without permission.