Those of you working on your taxes might find this useful: Kleinrock’s Total Tax Guide .
On-Line Tax Guide, Mediachest, and Tax Protester Legal Theories
Michael Edwards of Mediachest emailed me to respond to what I wrote about that site . I’d written that the site sounded like an interesting way to make borrowing easier and more efficient (and thus remove some more things from the realm of economic, taxable exchange), but also that I suspected that the site would be used for collecting intelligence about people for marketing and other purposes. Here’s what Michael Edwards says:
Your concern about Mediachest being a site that “you can expect… will also be used for marketing research and other forms of privacy-invasive intelligence-gathering” is valid, but in this case wrong. We have outlined in our privacy policy what we will and will not do with data. We will never reveal customer information to anyone, nor will we exchange or sell it. No business partners will have access to personally identifying information. Someone might see an ad that is targeted at them based on what items they own, but if we do this it will all be done on our server and the company will not have any way to know that you were delivered the ad unless you purchase the item. On the technology side we would ensure this by running our own custom ad server that either servers text-ads (a la google) or if serving images the images would be hosted on our servers so there would be no HTTP Referer logs made to a third party server.
I hope this doesn’t come across as a rant, but I just want to assure everyone that we take data privacy extremely seriously both as a company and on a personal level as well.
The Tax Protester Anti-Blog keeps a running tab of not-quite-clever-enough fringe tax protester legal theories as they get shot down in court. If you’re ever tempted to declare yourself a sovereign citizen or take a “slavery reparations tax credit” or some such — spend some time here first and learn from the mistakes of others.
