It’s possible that this game is just filling out numbers in the PDF for you and you can fill out your personal info manually, sign it, and mail it in. If it’s trying to do E-file for you, then yeah I would be scared.

Other services efile for you, why would this be any different

this service is a joke

It’s a conceit, not a joke. It’s serious satire.

Becoming an "Authorized IRS e-file Provider" is a significant hurdle that is not necessary to producing a real, mailable, tax return.

It's certainly a convenience, and most serious software would try to include it, but I don't think MSCHF are going for convenience. The Yahoo headline and article uses the word "file" but the video doesn't.

Thank you, you're the only one who's provided a reasonable answer instead of "it's a joke"

If they actually got this certified, it would be the ultimate troll!

I don’t know that the artists actually want people to file their taxes in the game, but for the critique to land you do actually need to be able to use it to file. That means asking for an SSN.

OTOH, it's not like Big Serious Organizations Run By Grownups have a great track record vis-a-vis data breaches either.

That's.... a much more valid point than it should be.

Furthermore, they've actually got a more direct and much more persistent motivation to exploit your personal information for all its worth.

In general the conventional narratives on personal security are completely backwards. If some drive by attacker gets your credit card or social security number and uses them to defraud someone else, your rights are well represented by the system and you have plenty of recourse. Whereas if some commercial surveillance advanced persistent threat gets your personal data accompanied by a boolean field in their database saying that you agreed to "terms" saying they can abuse it however they want, there is literally nothing you can do to stop them in the US. Furthermore the underground lists of CC/SSN your semi-private information made it into will eventually be considered stale and forgotten about, while corporate surveillance databases are forever.

Wait, I've never heard you cannot reverse the permission you've given some commercial entity to contact you.

Sure, I guess technically there are some narrowly-scoped abuses you do have the means to stop, so my "abuse it however they want" bites off too much (like for example they can't legally use your address to show up at your house and murder you either). But for the most part no, you have very little say in what is done with your personal information once other parties have a copy of it.

Intuit will not use your social security number to bankrupt you. Neither will MSCHF, but I doubt their encryption is that good

That's a straw man. And financial surveillance companies certainly do aim to use your personal information to extract as much value from you as possible - selling you crap you don't need today, higher insurance rates tomorrow, and so on.

I trust an "art collective" to treat my personal data like the radioactive waste it is more than the bigcos.

I think it's just a local game, it prepares a return but doesn't file it. Doesn't seem like there's much danger.

The developer comment on the itch.io page indicates that it can be played offline. You can also input a falsified SSN to the game and change it on the resulting paperwork if you desire.