Filing 2017 Taxes

[SlugSlinger]

Wow, if you didn't have a bunch of other posts, I'd say you were an employee of their company. That seriously sounded like an advertisement wording straight from the marketing department.

Make no mistake, nothing is free. Credit Karma is a lead generation company. They harvest your personal information to sell it to 3rd party companies for a profit. You should read the fine print in their terms of service and privacy policy. Not only will they advertise to you directly, but they will use the data and share with their partner companies.

Selling information is not their business model if you know anything about the comapny or how the website functions.
This is where I originally got information and started using Credit Karma.

https://clark.com/search/?q=credit karma

I trust Credit Karma more than I trusted Equifax.

Here’s the privacy policy for you to read.
https://www.creditkarma.com/about/privacy-20180122

When We Share the Information We Collect
First, we want to be clear about how we do not share information about you (what we call the “No-Nos”):

• We do not share your credit reports or scores with unaffiliated third parties (except agents acting on our behalf; we explain that below).
• We do not sell your Personal Information to or share your Personal Information with unaffiliated third parties for their own advertising or marketing purposes.

 

[NightShade]

Ended up using TurboTax, already done and got my state return. Still waiting on the feds but it should be within the next week or two. Also free. Used something else the year before which was free.

 

[Uncle TK]

We do not sell your Personal Information to or share your Personal Information with unaffiliated third parties for their own advertising or marketing purposes.
Any one they do business with (Sell List to) is a AFFILIATED third party

 

[SlugSlinger]

Now that we've covered the No-Nos, let us explain how we could share with third parties. We may share information about you, including Personal Information, with third parties in a variety of ways, such as:

• Agents acting on our behalf. We may share information about you with service providers or agents in order to have them perform on our behalf any of the activities we are permitted to conduct under this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. This includes things like designing or operating features, helping us research and test feature improvements, identifying offers or personalized recommendations, performing analytics and marketing our Services. These third parties are acting on our behalf so while they may have access to your information, including things like your credit reports and scores, they're required to follow our instructions and meet the standards explained in our Privacy Policy when handling information about you that we provide them.
• When we collaborate with third parties to provide and improve our Services. We may sometimes share information about you with third parties we collaborate with in connection with providing or improving our Services. This can occur, for example, when we're providing an integrated or co-branded feature with a partner (e.g., our Credit Score Simulator) or doing a joint research project with another organization to help improve our Services. We may also share information like the feedback you submit to us if it relates to both our Services and a partner's products. When we share information with third-party collaborators, our collaborators are obligated to follow the No-Nos above, but may also use the information in connection with their own activities to the extent allowed under their own privacy practices (e.g., respond to your feedback, conduct additional research, or improve a feature of theirs).
• Our partners when you ask for their services. We may also give you opportunities to interact with third party partners through our Services, such as when we provide you with the opportunity to review and send your personal information to a partner in order to pre-populate your application on the partner’s site or we send you to the partner’s site for you to provide the information directly to them. In some cases, if you click through to go to a partner’s site, you will automatically be sending your personal information to that partner to pre-populate your application on the partner’s site. When this happens, you will still have to submit your application on the partner’s site. Remember that any information you provide to the partner, whether through us or on your own, will be subject to their privacy practices and terms and conditions.
• When you publicly post the information. As part of our Services, we may provide opportunities for you to publicly post reviews, questions, comments, suggestions or other content, which may include Personal Information and portions of your Member Profile designated as public profile information, like your name or user name. Anything you share in a public forum is, obviously, public, so think carefully about what you decide to share. You should also read our Community Rules for more information on what is appropriate to post. If you would like us to remove Personal Information included in Community Content, contact us here. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your Personal Information, but we will try to respond to let you know why.
• As Part of a Corporate Change. We may disclose and transfer information about you to a third party as part of, or in preparation for, a change of control, restructuring, corporate change, or sale or transfer of assets. If such a business transfer results in a material change in the treatment of your Personal Information, you will be notified by e-mail (using the primary email address on your account) or by a prominent notice on our site.
• For Legal Reasons. We reserve the right to transfer or disclose information about you to third parties for certain legal purposes. (You can read more about these in the “How We Use the Information We Collect” section above.)
• With Your Consent. There may also be other limited contexts in which we share specific types of personal information with your express consent.

We may also share with third parties de-identified or aggregated data we collect, such as de-identified or aggregated credit reports or scores, de-identified demographic information, or information about the computer or device from which you access the Service. We share such information for a variety of purposes, including to analyze Service usage, develop shared services, and improve our own products and features.

 

[SlugSlinger]

What I suggest for those of you that are posting about privacy is to stay off the internet, get rid of any smart phones, late model vehicles, smart TVs, social accounts and to not talk to anyone. For those who do not want to abide by this suggestion, you can mitigate the risk of someone using or stealing your information.

I would suggest, at the very minimum, freeze all of your credit bureau’s accounts, just to keep your identity from being used to get credit.

Oh, and I guess I am now an affiliate of Credit Karma and they are getting free advertisement from me, although that wasn’t my original intent, which was to share a product that I use and see value in.

 

[SlugSlinger]

Ended up using TurboTax, already done and got my state return. Still waiting on the feds but it should be within the next week or two. Also free. Used something else the year before which was free.

Did you use TurboTax online? And did you use TT for both the state and federal returns and did you file both at the same time?

My state forms weren’t accepted until after my federal return was approved. So I’m just curious about the timing.

 

[NightShade]

Yep online, did both. Both filed at the same time and went right through.

Filed on the 18th. Federal was accepted the 19th, state accepted the 22nd. State came into the account on the 29th, feds didn't start processing till the 28th I believe so it should be in my account about 2 weeks or less from then.

 

[Jeff405]

How did you get TT free? Thats what I use and we have to pay for it every year. There is a free tax service for Federal employees, but you have to make under 66k. I can share that info if anyone is interested.

Does anyone have any reviews for FreeTaxUSA? Thats another I heard about $0 Fed and $12.95 State, I havent looked into it yet.

 

[Mos Eisley]

We may also share with third parties de-identified or aggregated data we collect...

This is the same with mobile phone companies, at least the one I work for. People get bent out of shape about them selling their "info". For legal reasons they choose not to sell Personally Identifiable Information. They sell de-identified data. We have to take a class once a year about safeguarding PII.

I put on here before about how Apple was working on a new thing with certain companies. For example, Home Depot. They will know to the inch exactly where you are in their store and how long you're standing in front of say, the cordless drills. Apple will then send you a coupon through your phone for a certain drill. It's kinda creepy but they don't really know, or care, who you are. They just know one of their phones spent X amount of time at a certain coordinate and they send that phone a coupon.

 

[beastep]

For what its worth I used Turbo Tax and got all mine back yesterday. I think I filed on Jan 30th.