PRIVACY: Tax preparers that shared private data with Meta, Google could be fined billions.

For its investigation, congressional staff interviewed representatives at tax-filing sites, as well as at Meta and Google. These interviews uncovered what their report said was “a troubling pattern and practice of data sharing by tax prep companies, a complete lack of corporate responsibility and accountability on the part of tax prep companies and Big Tech firms, and a potentially illegal use of sensitive taxpayer information.”

“Under the law, ‘a tax return preparer may not disclose or use a taxpayer’s tax return information prior to obtaining a written consent from the taxpayer,'” lawmakers’ letter said.

The only exception allows for data sharing with “auxiliary service providers” working “in connection with the preparation of a tax return.” However, lawmakers said that “Meta and Google likely do not meet the definition of ‘auxiliary service providers,'” partly because “the data sharing with Meta was for advertising purposes — not ‘in connection with the preparation of a tax return.'”

Plus:

A Meta spokesperson told Ars that Meta stands by a statement provided to Ars last year, saying that “advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our business tools. Doing so is against our policies and we educate advertisers on properly setting up business tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”

Translation: “Trust us,” says the company built on hoovering up every bit of personal data by whatever means are available.