meta-pixel-taxes VS bbs

The Markup co-published the article with The Verge. Their findings are publicly viewable on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes

Depends on the filter you're using. From the HARs in https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes the URL being called is "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js", and AdGuard's Content Blocker kills any fbevents.js, however, AdGuard's public DNS doesn't block connect.facebook.net, so for DNS-level protection you'd have to manually add that URL or use lists that do (1Hosts pro & xtra, energized social and extreme).

The source for this reporting, "The Markup" shares full screenshots and network captures of what they are basing their reporting on. Check out what H&R block sends, it's just page contents which happen to contain sensitive information.

> The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts

The original source[0] that did the investigation this have included some of the data they saw being shared that you can see at their GitHub[1]

[0]: https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websi...

[1]: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

People should be aware that privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.

I never trusted Signal due to https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/60

VPNs are totally detectable - its your traffic eg what ur searching up that is hard or impossible to decrypt. to make the VPN TRAFFIC itself undetectable, you have to obfuscate it. Now there could be a lot of reasons as to how your school blocked your vpn. The ports expressvpn use may have been blocked, for example. I personally don't use express vpn but use my own, but protocols like wireguard which MAY (im not sure) be used by express vpn use udp packets and the school could have just completely dropped them completely (Most games use udp packets since its faster), or the ip ranges you have been assigned on expressvpn may have just been blocked from the school wifi. As for why the cheap free vpn may be able to bypass your school wifi, it could be that it avoids the reasons above OR its something different like a proxy, which is what I use to bypass the restrictions at my high school. The fix, or what I do, is I setup my own servers. The price of a vps server at digital ocean is like 4 dollars a month, probably around the same price if not cheaper than expressvpn. Get yourself one, setup your own proxy server and connect to that. You can search around for tutorials, but the one I use is VMESS+TCP, essentially disguising the proxy traffic as a tcp packet so that the school can't distinguish it from regular traffic. Find a tutorial online, probably ask around on here: https://github.com/net4people/bbs If you followed a guide and still can't get it to work, your gna have to find an unblocked port. I would try 443 or 123 first since usually those aren't blocked but for my school 3478 is the one that works.