The agency opened an investigation into the maker of ChatGPT and is demanding records covering its security practices, AI training methods, and use of personal data. The FTC is taking on OpenAI, according to a document first published by the Washington Post on Thursday.The Markup has a great explainer on how you can see what your company is sending to Meta through tracking pixels! Take a read here.) What else I'm reading “The underlying thread is the same: consumers may be more aware of how much data a single website or app or platform gathers directly, but most are unaware about just how many other companies are operating behind the scenes to gather similar or even more data every time they go online.” “This ecosystem involves everything from first-party collectors of data, such as apps and websites, to all the embedded tracking tools and pixels, online ad exchanges, data brokers, and other tech elements that capture and transmit data about people, including sensitive data about health or finances, and often to third parties,” Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, wrote to me in an email. Often, users don’t know that websites they visit have pixels. In the past, privacy advocates have warned about pixels collecting user data about abortion access, for example. They contribute to the dominant economic model of the internet, which encourages data collection in the interest of targeted advertising and hyper-personalization online. So what are the risks? These tracking pixels are everywhere, and many ads served online are placed at their direction. They are different from cookies, which store information about you, your computer, and your behavior on each website you visit. Pixels allow websites to communicate with advertising services across websites and devices, so that an ad provider can learn about a user. That data can be used to target ads according to what you might be interested in. Highly sensitive data can be gleaned from those sorts of activities. The results can include information like where users click, what they type, and how long they scroll. Websites that use these pixels to collect information about their own users often end up sharing that data with big tech companies. Some of the most commonly used pixels are made by Google, Meta, and Bing.
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What are tracking pixels? At the center of the controversy are tracking pixels: bits of code that many websites embed to learn more about user behavior. It seems Google did not use the information for its own commercial purposes as directly as Meta, though it’s unclear whether the company used the data elsewhere, an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN.Įxperts say that both tax prep and tech companies could face significant legal consequences, including private lawsuits, challenges from the Federal Trade Commission, even criminal charges from the US federal government. Meta said it used the data to target ads to users on its platforms and to train its AI programs.
The tech companies had access to very sensitive data-like millions of peoples’ incomes, the size of their tax refunds, and even their enrollment status in government programs-dating back as early as 2011. The story prompted a congressional probe into the data practices of tax companies, and that report, published Wednesday, showed that things were much worse than even the Markup’s bombshell reporting suggested. It found that the sites were sending data to Meta through Meta Pixel, a commonly used piece of computer code often embedded in websites to track users. What's the story? In November 2022, the Markup published an investigation into tax prep companies including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R block. The findings expose the significant privacy risks that advertising and data sharing pose, and it’s possible that regulators might actually do something about it. Many of them say they have removed the pixels, but it’s not clear whether some sensitive data is still being held by the tech companies. The tax companies shared the data through tracking pixels, which are used for advertising purposes, an investigative congressional report revealed on Wednesday. But we learned this week that tax prep companies have been sharing millions of taxpayers’ sensitive personal information with Meta and Google, some for over a decade. You might think (or at least hope) that sensitive data like your tax returns would be kept under close care.
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