Attorney Files RICO Suit Against H&R Block, Google and Meta

I think this lawsuit is a bit ballsy but the attorney who filed it won an almost $90 million verdict against Monsanto, so who am I to judge.

The suits alleges that the three companies’ joint actions should be considered a pattern of racketeering on a massive scale.

The issue is that H&R Block inserted beacons on various web page in their online tax preparation software and fed more than just the page information back to Google and Meta. It fed detailed information from the tax return back.

Google, not surprisingly, blamed H&R Block for Google’s sale of your personally identifiable data (sure, makes sense to me).

IF Google had deleted that data once they realized what they had then probably they would have been off the hook, but since some people might consider them greedy, the decided to sell the data anyway.

I would say that H&R is going to have a bigger challenge getting off the hook.

Meta kept its mouth shut, which is probably smart.

To add insult to this, last week the Federal Trade Commission warned Block and four other tax prep firms that they would be penalized if they used the data for advertising without getting users’ permissions.

Meta, Google and Block claim that the data is anonymous, but we all know that is total bull poop. It is way to easy to re-associate that data with a person if they want to.

Just in case you think the attorney who filed the lawsuit is a whack job, in 2018 he was named “Titan of the Plaintiff’s Bar” by Law360. It is a lifetime achievement award.

Credit: The Record

by