Facebook owner Meta said on Wednesday it had uncovered malware purveyors leveraging public interest in ChatGPT to lure users into downloading malicious apps and browser extensions, likening the phenomenon to cryptocurrency scams. From a report: Since March, the social media giant has found around 10 malware families and more than 1,000 malicious links that were promoted as tools featuring the popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, it said in a report. In some cases, the malware delivered working ChatGPT functionality alongside abusive files, the company said. Speaking at a press briefing on the report, Meta Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen said that for bad actors, "ChatGPT is the new crypto."

The co-founders of Google DeepMind and LinkedIn have launched an AI chatbot called Pi (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), which aims to provide relaxed and supportive conversations rather than information or specific tasks, distinguishing itself by encouraging dialogue and inquiry from users. The Financial Times reports: The first product from the year-old AI start-up behind Pi, Inflection AI, comes as the growing hype around generative AI drives a surge of investor and consumer interest. Users of Pi can have personal conversations with the chatbot, either directly via an app, or through text, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Inflection AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman described the chatbot as having the persona of a sympathetic sounding board, rather than trying to provide information. The product, which has been beta-tested by users for several months, has a narrow use case, which makes it safer and easier to control, Suleyman said.

"There's lots of things Pi cannot do. It doesn't do lists, or coding, it doesn't do travel plans, it won't write your marketing strategy, or your essay for school," Suleyman said in an interview with the Financial Times. "It's purely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation." Eventually, the personal AI tool would also provide assistance such as helping users perform online tasks, but was currently more for "mundane, trivial and banal" conversations, according to Suleyman.

In a live demo of the chatbot, Pi appeared distinct from others such as ChatGPT or Bard in that it often ended its responses with a question for the user, encouraging dialogue. "That's what Pi does really well, it helps facilitate your own line of inquiry," Suleyman said. However, it does not provide citations or references, although Suleyman said that will change. It also sometimes fabricates facts, as is the case with all large language models -- the technology underlying the new generation of chatbots, he added.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47.

In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret.

The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.

Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work." Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.

The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).

But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems: Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...

For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...

Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...

Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...

Meta sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors Wednesday. From a report: While he was vague about how exactly Meta will add generative AI to its apps, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed preview yet during the company's earnings call for the first quarter of this year, when it reported $28.6 billion in revenue and a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app, beating Wall Street's estimates. Meta's profit for the quarter was $5.7 billion, a 24 percent decrease from the same time last year. "We're exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well," Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. "I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the metaverse, too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together."

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Meta said its virtual reality and augmented reality unit, Reality Labs, recorded a $3.99 billion operating loss. The unit generated just $339 million in revenue. CNBC reports: The numbers show a slowdown from last quarter, when Reality Labs lost $4.28 billion on $727 million of revenue. For all of last year, Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of $13.72 billion on $2.16 billion in sales, underscoring how VR and AR technologies have yet to reach the mainstream. Despite Reality Labs' operating loss, Meta posted first-quarter net earnings of $5.71 billion, or $2.20 a share, with revenue up less than 3% to $28.65 billion from $27.91 billion a year ago. This sent its stock soaring more than 10% in extended trading Wednesday.

"Facebook had 2.04 billion daily active users, up 5% from a year ago, and the 'family' of Meta apps -- which includes Instagram -- reported daily active users of 3.02 billion, up 4%," adds MarketWatch.

Meta's head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called into question the values of TikTok by invoking the anti-China rhetoric that's become a trademark of lawmakers that want to expel his company's rival from the US. From a report: "TikTok, a hugely successful, highly dynamic and innovative Chinese company, is able to operate in the United States, but companies like Meta are not able to operate our social media services in China," Clegg said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg TV. "So there is this issue of a kind of lack of a level playing field. And in the end, there's always an underlying issue of values: What values are the underpinning of new technologies?" TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has said it's not a Chinese company and is walling off sensitive US operations to house all data and employees in America. The app also isn't available in China. Still, it hasn't been able to shake concerns about its ownership and whether that opens up the app for influence or data collection by the Chinese government.

Clegg's comments echo the hawkish sentiments that have swirled around China and TikTok's connection to the country. In the US, where the social media platform has amassed 150 million users every month, the company is facing a national security review and legislation that could limit its availability in the country. There are "pretty profound differences in values" in how China views technology and individual privacy, Clegg said, including the country's willingness to seal off most of its internet from access by foreign companies. This has also expanded to discussions about new artificial intelligence technologies where, he said, "Chinese authorities are already rushing to insert their values and the way in which those AI systems are developed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workspace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad in meticulous detail, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he's watched, and records what he thought of them. It's also a handy way to keep tabs on his 3D-printing projects, map snowboarding runs, and quickly update his cute list of the funny things his kid has said. It might sound strange, but Bergen is one of a growing number of people using Notion, software intended for work, to organize their personal lives. They're using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists.

So why has a platform built to accommodate "better, faster work" struck such a chord when there are countless other planning apps out there? Part of the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its flexibility. At its heart, Notion is designed to combine the various programs a business might use for functions like HR, sales, and product planning in a single hub. It uses simple templates that let users add or remove features, and remote workers can easily collaborate on notes, databases, calendars, and project boards. This high level of customizability sets Notion apart from other work apps. It's also what's made it so popular among people looking to map out their free time. It started to gain traction around 2018 in YouTube's thriving productivity subculture, where videos of fans swapping time management tips and guides to organizing their lives regularly rack up millions of views.

Since then, its following has snowballed. More than 275,000 people have joined a dedicated subreddit, tens of thousands of users share free page templates in private Facebook groups, and TikTok videos advising viewers on how to make their Notion pages look pretty have been watched hundreds of millions of times. "You don't have to change your habits to how rigid software is. The software will change how your mind works," says Akshay Kothari, Notion's cofounder and chief operating officer. "I think that's actually been a big reason why you see so much love in the community: because people feel like the things they build are theirs." While platforms like Notion are great for people who enjoy feeling organized, spending too much time optimizing and organizing our lives can be counterproductive when we prioritize creating to-do lists over completing the actual tasks on them, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University. It's a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy.

Using Notion to track whether you're drinking enough water or going jogging, or using it to plan assignments, doesn't necessarily mean you're actually getting those things done. "In a way, Notion might help me to get structure, but it might not work to get me going," she says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.

Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.

Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."

The U.S. Supreme Court, exploring free speech rights in the social media era, on Monday agreed to consider whether the Constitution's First Amendment bars government officials from blocking their critics on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The justices took up an appeal by two members of a public school board from the city of Poway in Southern California of a lower court's ruling in favor of school parents who sued after being blocked from Facebook pages and a Twitter account maintained by the officials. The justices also took up an appeal by a Michigan man of a lower court's ruling against him after he sued a city official in Port Huron who blocked him on Facebook following critical posts made by the plaintiff about the local government's COVID-19 response. At issue is whether a public official's social media activity can amount to governmental action bound by First Amendment limits on government regulation of speech.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: According to Google Trends, peak "Lean to Code" occurred in early 2019 when laid-off Buzzfeed and Huffpost journalists were taunted with the phrase on Twitter... As Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently put it, "We're in a different world." Indeed. Encouraging kids to pursue CS careers in Code.org's viral 2013 launch video, Zuckerberg explained, "Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find."

In Learning to Code Isn't Enough, a new MIT Technology Review article, Joy Lisi Rankin reports on the long history of learn-to-code efforts, which date back to the 1960s. "Then as now," Lisi Rankin writes, "just learning to code is neither a pathway to a stable financial future for people from economically precarious backgrounds nor a panacea for the inadequacies of the educational system."
But is that really true? Vox does note that the latest round of layoffs at Meta "is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach." Yet while that's also true at other companies, those laid-off tech workers also seem to be finding similar positions by working in other industries: Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies. "Early layoffs were dominated by recruiters, which is forgoing future hiring," Revelio senior economist Reyhan Ayas told Vox. "Whereas in 2023 we see a shift toward more core engineering and software engineering, which signals a change in focus of current business priorities."

In other words, tech companies aren't just trimming the fat by firing people who fill out their extensive ecosystem, which ranges from marketers to massage therapists. They're also, many for the first time, making cuts to the people who build the very products they're known for, and who enjoyed a sort of revered status since they, like the founders of the companies, were coders. Software engineers are still important, but they don't have the power they used to...

The latest monthly jobs report by tech industry association CompTIA found that even though employment at tech companies (which includes all roles at those companies) declined slightly in March, employment in technical occupations across industry sectors increased by nearly 200,000 positions. So even if tech companies are laying off tech workers, other industries are snatching them up. Unfortunately for software engineers and the like, that means they might also have to follow those industries' pay schemes. The average software engineer base pay in the US is $90,000, according to PayScale, but can be substantially higher at tech firms like Facebook, where such workers also get bonuses and stock options.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said the embattled company may not be done with layoffs even as it goes through its latest round of 4,000 this week and braces for another batch in May. MarketWatch reports: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which announced its intention to slash 21,000 jobs late last year, is also likely to dramatically slow down hiring, Zuckerberg told employees in a town hall on Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal report. "I just kind of think that for where we are in the efficiency that we're able to get from new technologies, that's probably the right model to expect going forward and that will be a different operating model and I think we can do it well," Zuckerberg said in a virtual Q&A session, the report said.

Meta, which announces quarterly results on Wednesday, faces an uncertain future over the next few years, Zuckerberg said, and there are no guarantees the workforce reductions are over. "I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don't want to kind of promise that there won't be future things in the future," he said. "What I can say is that there's nothing that we're planning now, and if we do something, it'll be sort of on that time frame."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Facebook users have until August to claim their share of a $725 million class-action settlement of a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by the social media company, a new website reveals. The lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

People who had an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until Aug. 25 to enter a claim. Individual settlement payments haven't yet been established because payouts depend on how many users submit claims and how long each user maintained a Facebook account. Facebook users can make a claim by visiting Facebookuserprivacysettlement.com and entering their name, address, email address, and confirming they lived in the U.S. and were active on Facebook between the aforementioned dates.

The FBI, Interpol and the UK's National Crime Agency have accused Meta of making a "purposeful" decision to increase end-to-end encryption in a way that in effect "blindfolds" them to child sex abuse. From a report: The Virtual Global Taskforce, made up of 15 law enforcement agencies, issued a joint statement saying that plans by Facebook and Instagram-parent Meta to expand the use of end-to-end encryption on its platforms were "a purposeful design choice that degrades safety systems," including with regards to protecting children. The law enforcement agencies also warned technology companies more broadly about the need to balance safeguarding children online with protecting users' privacy. "The VGT calls for all industry partners to fully appreciate the impact of implementing system design decisions that result in blindfolding themselves to CSA [child sexual abuse] occurring on their platforms or reduces their capacity to identify CSA and keep children safe," the statement said.

As the European Union gears up to enforce a major reboot of its digital rulebook in a matter of months, a new dedicated research unit is being spun up to support oversight of large platforms under the bloc's flagship Digital Services Act (DSA). From a report: The European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT), which was officially inaugurated in Seville, Spain, today, is expected to play a major role in interrogating the algorithms of mainstream digital services -- such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

ECAT is embedded within the EU's existing Joint Research Centre (JRC), a long-established science facility that conducts research in support of a broad range of EU policymaking, from climate change and crisis management to taxation and health sciences. But while the ECAT is embedded within the JRC -- and temporarily housed in the same austere-looking building (Seville's World Trade Centre), ahead of getting more open-plan bespoke digs in the coming years -- it has a dedicated focus on the DSA, supporting lawmakers to gather evidence to build cases so they can act on any platforms that don't take their obligations seriously. Commission officials describe the function of ECAT being to identify "smoking guns" to drive enforcement of the DSA -- say, for example, an AI-based recommender system that can be shown is serving discriminatory content despite the platform in question claiming to have taken steps to "de-bias" output -- with the unit's researchers being tasked with coming up with hard evidence to help the Commission build cases for breaches of the new digital rulebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Meta will conduct another mass round of layoffs on Wednesday, several sources working at the company told Vox. In an internal memo posted to a Meta employee message board on Tuesday evening and viewed by Vox, the company told employees that the layoffs will start on Wednesday and will impact a wide range of technical teams including those working on Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo was sent to employees but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the range of 4,000 jobs, one source said.

"This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta," Lori Goler, Meta's head of people, said in the memo. Meta employees in North America will be notified by email between 4 am to 5 am PT Wednesday morning, according to Goler's note. Outside of North America, the timelines will vary country to country, and some countries will not be impacted. Meta is also asking employees in North America, whose job allow it, to work from home on Wednesday to give people "space to process the news." "The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company would cut 10,000 more jobs in the coming months, after already cutting 11,000 in November," notes Vox.

After placing an early bet on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft has another secret weapon in its arsenal: its own artificial intelligence chip for powering the large-language models responsible for understanding and generating humanlike language. The Information: The software giant has been developing the chip, internally code-named Athena, since as early as 2019, according to two people with direct knowledge of the project. The chips are already available to a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees, who are testing the technology, one of them said. Microsoft is hoping the chip will perform better than what it currently buys from other vendors, saving it time and money on its costly AI efforts. Other prominent tech companies, including Amazon, Google and Facebook, also make their own in-house chips for AI. The chips -- which are designed for training software such as large-language models, along with supporting inference, when the models use the intelligence they acquire in training to respond to new data -- could also relieve a shortage of the specialized computers that can handle the processing needed for AI software. That shortage, reflecting the fact that primarily just one company, Nvidia, makes such chips, is felt across tech. It has forced Microsoft to ration its computers for some internal teams, The Information has reported.

The Asia Internet Coalition, an influential industry organization representing technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, has voiced concerns over a recent amendment to India's IT rules, saying the changes grant the local government expansive content removal authority without implementing adequate procedural safeguards. From a report: India recently updated its IT rules, barring social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from disseminating false or misleading information about the government's business affairs. Under the new regulations, these firms must rely on New Delhi's own fact-checking unit to verify claims. The amendments lack the "sufficient procedural safeguards" to protect people's fundamental rights to access information, said Jeff Paine, Managing Director of AIC in a statement Monday.

A New York Times opinion piece argues people in the AI industry "are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down." But how? What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That's where the government comes in — or so they hope... [A]fter talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I'd prioritize.

The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it's not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand... The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It's ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures.

The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet. Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast.
The piece also recommends that AI-design companies "bear at least some liability for what their models." But what legislation should we see — and what legislation will we see? "One thing regulators shouldn't fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry," the piece argues.

"For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down."

Online tax-filing services from TurboTax and H&R Block "want to blab your tax return secrets," warns the Washington Post. "Why? To help them make more money." If you prepare your taxes online with TurboTax or H&R Block software, at some point you'll see a message that I found confusing. "We can help you do more," TurboTax says. In this case, that "help" is funneling the private information from your tax return to Intuit — the company that owns TurboTax, Credit Karma and accounting software QuickBooks. H&R Block offers to "personalize your H&R Block experience."

If you say yes, you're going to see email and other marketing from Intuit and H&R Block or its business partners that are tailored to what's in your tax return.

That might include how much money you make, how much you owe in student loans, the size of your tax return and your charitable contributions. For example, a credit card company might pay Intuit's Credit Karma to show offers to high-income people. Intuit knows that information from your tax return. The Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote last year about how these two companies grab for your secret tax return information. He dubbed it "the Facebook-ization of personal finance."

In a way, the tax prep companies are more aggressive than Facebook. What they're doing is mission creep. You might already be paying TurboTax and H&R Block to prepare or file your tax return. Now they also want your permission to pass along your secrets to make even more money off you.