> Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
> The centerpiece of Intuit’s anti-encroachment strategy has been the Free File program, hatched 17 years ago in a moment of crisis for the company. Under the terms of an agreement with the federal government, Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system.
> Since Free File’s launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program’s reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find.
> What is clear is that Intuit’s business relies on keeping the use of Free File low. The company has repeatedly declined to say how many of its paying customers are eligible for the program, which is currently open to anyone who makes under $66,000. But based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.
in a "To Serve Man" sort of way ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...
installing ublock Origin should help block most of those nasty analytics hoovers
For more than twenty years, we had to click "upload" or alike to confirm the upload of a file to a server. I wonder how many millions or billions files Google steals (yes, that's theft) from gullible users who use their web interface.
If I take an analogy: think of it as if you were typing a message in an IM chat window. Anything you'd type would be sent immediately to the service owner, whether or not you click "send" at the end. I understand this feel normal to you but I personally find this abusive and a total treachery from Google.
To support my point: I used to have access to a corporate proxy that performs TLS inspection for a little less than 50k employees. I looked into this specific scenario to get an idea of how many employees were being abused by this. It is quite easy to find: just filter for queries sent to GMail's API when you cancel a file upload or you remove an attachment from a draft. We have several hundreds of those events each year in our logs.
These people quite candidly think they "cancelled" the upload, but it didn't. Google got the file, analysed it, extracted knowledge out of it and potentially adjusted your profile and your employer's. This falls under the definition of a dark pattern.
There is something worse than using GMail for your emails: it's using GMail's web interface.
How do you know this? It's against their stated privacy policy.
This is also a kind of strange position to be arguing when you just described snooping on people's secure communications. Why is that OK and what Gmail does isn't?
We do not prevent our users from using GMail for personal use, but we analyze the traffic for malicious or deviant patterns to detect potential data leaks. Analyzing the amount of users who inadvertently send a file in GMail then rapidly "change their mind" is still, in our shared opinion, a relevant analysis to perform. We report the number of quarterly cases in an awareness newsletter and remind users to be attentive when selecting a file to be uploaded in webmails.
Good thing: the occurrences have decreased since we raise this concern. We cannot prove it is linked to our newsletter but our "ego" enjoys believing so.
I would have agreed with you if I actually had both a username and a filename shown on my screen, but this does not happen. Our report shows the total count of cancelled uploads per country.
We have someone at HR who can actually see the detailed events (including file names) for a given user. It seems to that this would match what you see as "snooping". But this an investigation led by Human resources upon a suspicion of employee misbehavior. It has nothing to do with our infosec activities.
I hope I changed your mind, at least a little ;)
Did something happen? Did they change ownership? Any good alternatives to taxact?
My tax preparer is something like $250 a year and reduced my liability in a very tumultuous year from about $20K to about $9K by understanding what I actually had going on and helping to work through it.
The first year I moved to the US, I had a whole bunch of things going on. Buying a house, working from home, buying a hybrid car etc., getting married. I had no real idea about the tax system, so saved all our receipts etc., and went to H&R Block.
"So what do you want to claim?"
"What can I claim?"
"What do you mean?"
"Here's a bunch of receipts and I can tell you all the details."
[vaguely confused look] "Let's go through the app."
And I watched as basically she transcribed our most basic information into their in house version of something akin to TurboTax.
I could have done that myself.
I complained. And did, eventually, get someone there who knew how to not be a glorified transcriptionist.
And then the next year found someone who had knowledge of their own.
It hit a weird case and she didn't know what to do. Eventually I looked up the actual tax code and told her what to do. As far as I remember it was about splitting the cost basis over multiple years. I owned some weird stock where that came up.
Somewhere, in the back of my mind I know that all data I enter online is inevitably being hovered up and used for god knows what, but when you're suddenly made aware of it, it's really unnerving.
Something about this makes me want to have a 'falling down' moment. Let me get this straight, not only is our tax system so complex and error prone i have to pay money to a third party to figure out how much I should be paying to our government, but the software company I pay then turns around and sells my data? The government does nothing to remedy this? It really goes to show who our government serves, and it sure as hell isn't 'the people'.