Other than when Senators referred to it as a shocking breach of privacy by "Big Tech" and the article includes a digression on Facebook's supposed long history of privacy issues, clearly implying this is another such incident?
The letter from Sen. Warren that caused this press article blames Meta and Google for these events. It says "The Big Tech firms also appeared to act with stunning disregard for taxpayer privacy" even though Google and Meta had no agency in these matters.
I take issue with this statement.
agency is defined as -- via google - as action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect
If google/meta creates a product like google analytics that is then used by third parties ( even if it is misused -- for various values of misused ), in itself, it is an action. You can say they were not actively involved ( and I do wonder about that, but I have no definitive proof one way or another ), but it is hard to argue they have no agency.
It is an equivalent of 'look, we are only selling the thing that we also happen to completely control online and we have no control over how it is used'. It is not a great defense ( and it is very easy to portray negatively ).
> Taxpayer data was also shared with Google, through its own tracking tools — though the firm told lawmakers that it never used the information to track users on the internet, according to the report.
So, they only store a unique id in their user tracking system, but they put the sensitive information in their ad targeting system, then join the data at impression time.
I guess it is good that they don’t stick PII in tracking cookies that they use to interoperate with third parties, but that is an extremely low bar.
I don't see where you get that people are blaming the platform. It sounds to me that they're blaming the tax prep companies that shared the sensitive data.