Your reply seems to be missing the point the OP is making, which is that the information goes to Facebook because these companies have mis-configured (or in the case of TaxAct, seemingly deliberately chosen to configure) their apps to send this data. I’d be pretty surprised if Facebook’s licensing agreement for the Meta Pixel doesn’t inoculate them from misbehavior by companies collecting data.

Part of Facebook’s product is presumably to have a concept of identity that stretches beyond whether or not you’re a user of their site. People’s identity can essentially be hashed out of some combination of their name, birthdate, and probably one or two other combinations of distinct qualities, and then marketing data for that person is then stored according to that hash. This is how they preserve anonymity, in theory.

Ironically a lot of people in this very thread are chiming in to criticize Meta for not rejecting this data despite the article itself clearly stating how the fuck-ups are the responsibility of the offending companies.

That’s not the point being discussed here.

In this case the article lays out pretty clearly why the issue is with the companies and not with Facebook. More or less all of the leaks come from things that the product teams responsible should have probably known better, and one comes from a distinct design choice by TaxAct that frankly looks really bad for them.