🧾 Tax filing websites have been sending users' financial information to Facebook

Plus: How Sam Bankman-Fried Sold The Bahamas An Empty Crypto Dream, This Is Where Most of the World's Soccer Balls Come From, and more…

Today’s pick

Tax filing websites have been sending users' financial information to Facebook. Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code… (Colin Lecher / The Verge)

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr @doctorow

A blockbuster investigative report from @themarkup and The @verge reveals that major tax-prep services illegally embedded the Facebook tracking pixel in their sites, configured so that it transmitted as much data as possible to the surveillance giant. theverge.com/2022/11/22/234… 3/

theverge.comTax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to FacebookThe Markup found that tax preparation services including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block have sent users’ personal financial information to Facebook through the Meta Pixel.

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How Sam Bankman-Fried Sold The Bahamas An Empty Crypto Dream. For Bahamian FTX employees, working for the crypto giant was a dream job: Most had doubled their salaries, ate from a daily buffet of steaks and sliders and had access to a lineup of BMWs and Jeeps. Even their groceries were often paid for. Their… (Sarah Emerson / Forbes)

sarah emerson @SarahNEmerson

NEW: Sam Bankman-Fried made the Bahamas the home of FTX. Now, its calamitous downfall has left countless employees, restauranteurs, government officials, and Bahamian locals to navigate the wreckage. Here's my and @DavidJeans2 dispatch from Nassau:

forbes.comHow Sam Bankman-Fried Sold The Bahamas An Empty Crypto DreamThe FTX founder blew into the island nation with promises of prosperity and philanthropy. After he allegedly oversaw the use of customer deposits to fuel risky crypto trading, Bankman-Fried’s empire collapsed — and Bahamians are reeling from yet another scandal.

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This Is Where Most of the World's Soccer Balls Come From. If you have a soccer ball in your house, there's a pretty good chance it came from Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan near the Kashmiri border. More than two-thirds of the world's soccer balls are made in one of the town's 1,000 factories. That… (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Quicktake @Quicktake

Sialkot, a city in northeast Pakistan, produces about 70% of the world’s soccer ball supply — including Adidas’s Al Rihla, the official ball of the 2022 FIFA #WorldCup in Qatar trib.al/uzOpwh3

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The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends.

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China just announced a new social credit law. Here's what it means.. While local governments have been much more ambitious with their innovative regulations, causing more controversies and public pushback, the countrywide social credit system will still take a long time to materialize. And China is now closer than… (Zeyi Yang / MIT Technology Review)

Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅 @ZeyiYang

It’s easier to talk about what China’s social credit system isn’t than what it is. But I decided to take a stab, since China drafted a new law on Nov 14 that also tried (and maybe failed) to explain what the system is. My new @techreview Explains entry:

technologyreview.comChina just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it means.The West has largely gotten China’s social credit system wrong. But draft legislation introduced in November offers a more accurate picture of the reality.

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Here's Proof Hate Speech is More Viral on Elon Musk's Twitter. Elon Musk reactivated Donald Trump's Twitter account last weekend, reversing a ban imposed in January 2021 after his posts were deemed to have incited violence at the US Capitol. Trump has not started using his account again, but social media… (Will Knight / WIRED)

WIRED @WIRED

Twitter, which no longer has any communications staff after the recent layoffs, did not respond to a request for comment.

wired.trib.alHere’s Proof Hate Speech Is More Viral on Elon Musk’s TwitterResearchers monitoring a “firehose” of public tweets found signs of increasing toxicity—before Elon Musk reversed bans on Trump and other divisive figures.

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