OPINION:
I doubt very much that the news will cause Faceboogers to leave for more secure arenas. The people I know with FB, think FB is the second coming and can walk on water and turn it into wine.
Those proverbial ‘they’ would say that resistance was futile - but there was no resistance - they just stepped into it.
~s
I knew a company Controller (the guy that signs checks), he also ran the Accounting Dept. He kept tabs on the Accounts Payable clerks and how many invoces did they process per month. Predictably, the low scorer was laid off on a quarterly basis. The clerks never knew this.
Facebook doesn’t even know what data they have or where it’s all stored:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/09/facebook-has-no-idea-what-data-it-has.html
The Intercept, quoting Motherboard:
" The remarks in the hearing echo those found in an internal document leaked to Motherboard earlier this year detailing how the internal engineering dysfunction at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, makes compliance with data privacy laws an impossibility. “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose,’” the 2021 document read."
They can’t sell what they can’t find, right?
The old meme, “security through obscurity”!
I’m almost incredulous at Meta’s sheer audacity… Almost.
Anyway, heads up, if you’re using a Facebook app.
Meta forced to sell Giphy. (Yay! 
)
Or, or, or: It could have been driven by an urge to track gifs as they bounce around the internet from user to user to user to user to user to…?
Or it could also have been motivated by a desire to annoy users all around the internet with animated GIFs. 
Commercial tax software companies (U.S.) share customers’ detailed private data with Meta…and Google.
And the standard canned response: “We take our customers’ privacy seriously.” (No, seriously… We TAKE it.)
P.S. I’ve used OpenTaxSolver for Linux for years, and recommend it highly for U.S. income tax and the few State tax return packages they currently provide.
It takes two to tango though. You can blame Facebook for buying but you can blame “tax-filing websites” for selling.
Is there something hidden in the Ts and Cs of the “tax-filing websites” where “you” agreed to this??
I can’t speak for the situation in the US but here you can partly blame it on the government for making it so damn complicated that you might even need software or a company in order to file your tax return.
Facebook to websites: “Embed our oh-so-useful Pixel in your website! It’s so easy, and totally free! Enhance your customers’ experience while gaining useful insights about them, which you can share with us. P.S. The default settings should be all right.”
Facebook to critics: “Those websites are using it wrong.”
No mention in any of their Ts&Cs of any collection by Pixel.
Amen!
Slightly more detail here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing
Then if I were a customer of one of those tax-filing websites, I would be screaming blue murder.
Apparently this story is hitting TV news now, so it’s apparently getting some traction.
I had never heard of this before.
Thanks!
He said that while he was deleting his Facebook account, he took a look at “Off-Facebook Activity” and learned that Meta actually had a “record of most of his in-store purchases made at Home Depot.”
(Customer provided his email address at checkout in the store.)
Everybody says “we respect the privacy of the customer” but they always leave off “now that we’ve been caught.”
This instance is particularly creepy, a brick-and-mortar store passing customer data directly to #^(%!^@ Facebook. Still, I’m not surprised.