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NEW: State healthcare sites around the country have been quietly sending sensitive user data to Google and LinkedIn.
The Markup
7,845 posts
The Markup
@themarkup
Challenging technology to serve the public good.
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- Replying to @themarkupBut there were huge differences. Gmail sent 63 percent of @PeteButtigieg's campaign email to the primary inbox. But it sent none of @ewarren's campaign email there. And only 2 percent of @BernieSanders's campaign email landed in the primary inbox.
- NEW: Some of the country’s top hospitals have been sending sensitive patient information to Facebook. These hospitals may have violated HIPAA, experts say.
- New: We analyzed Trump and Biden Facebook ads and found Facebook charged Biden more than it charged Trump on average. The gap was especially wide for ads targeted to swing-state voters in July and August, when Biden paid, on average, double Trump's rate.
- Thread🧵 Email is a political battleground. Candidates work hard to spit-polish messages that will raise money and turn out the vote. But Gmail’s black box sorting algorithm sends many political messages to a separate tab that users may rarely check.📭
- #NEW: Lenders are more likely to deny home loans to people of color than White people with similar financial backgrounds. Black people were 80% more likely to be denied, @eh_mah_nwel and @lkirchner reveal in their latest investigation.
- Welcome to The Markup. We are a new nonprofit newsroom that will produce meaningful data-centered journalism investigating the societal harms of technology. themarkup.org
- NEW: The New York City government’s chatbot is telling businesses to break labor and housing law. With @THECITYNY, @Documentedny:
- NEWS: @SenWarren, @RepKatiePorter, and more demand tax filing companies and Big Tech give answers about their tracking of taxpayers’ info. “An appalling breach of users’ trust and a potentially illegal misuse of sensitive taxpayer data,” they call it: mrkup.org/tax-accountabi…
![Screenshot of congressional letter directed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. It reads "We write with grave concerns following a report that major tax preparation companies such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been “secretly transmitting sensitive financial information” to Meta and Google when Americans file their taxes online, including “data on
users’ income, filing status, [and] refund amounts.” If true, this is an appalling breach of users’ trust and a potentially illegal abuse of sensitive taxpayer data that raises questions about the misuse of data by the tax preparation companies and about the role of Google in facilitating these
abuses. Given these new reports, we seek a full accounting of and explanation for the disclosure of taxpayer data to Google." The rest of the letter is available at https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/TaxPrepMetaLetters.pdf](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fj8sHFsWIAAHKzi.jpg)
- NEW from @LeonYin and @ASankin: Last year YouTube’s CEO said Black lives matter. But we found that its ad portal makes it more difficult for advertisers to find social and racial justice videos by blocking keywords including Black Lives Matter. themarkup.org/google-the-gia…
- BREAKING: A congressional report has confirmed that Meta and major tax preparation companies inappropriately shared millions of taxpayers’ financial data. “Shockingly careless” is how the investigation, led by @SenWarren, described it. themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/202…
- Replying to @themarkupFor example, Google Ads blocks ad targeting with “Black power,” a phrase associated with the African American civil rights movement, but offered more than 100 million YouTube videos and channels related to the White supremacist phrase “White power.”
