Hi Turbotax employees,
I've used turbotax desktop for years. I always used the desktop version, because I do not feel comfortable having my financial data held or stored by a third party such as Intuit. Particularly, since the language of privacy policies is overly complex, and in most cases, companies such as Intuit reserve the right to revise their privacy policies at will. So far s I am concerned, there is no guarantee of privacy.
It used to be the case, that when importing data into Turbotax desktop directly from financial institutions, the desktop software would open a dialog and request that I log in directly to the brokerage. So, it appeared that the TurboTax software was downloading the data directly from the brokerage into TurboTax desktop, without the data ever touching Intuit's servers.
Last year, I noticed when using Turbotax, that for many financial institutions, in order to directly import data into turbotax, instead of opening a dialog box to log into the financial institution directly, the dialog now directs me to provide a login for Intuit first. Only afterwards can I download data from the brokerage. So I was uncomfortable.
This week, I logged into my Intuit account in order to do the following year's taxes. Under account management, there are entries for "Download your data" and "documents. " Now, I see there is data from my various financial accounts (1099's and so forth) that are residing on Intuit's servers from my last filing. Is that true then? Intuit is keeping copies of data directly downloaded from my financial institutions, even if I am using TurboTax desktop? If so, that is highly concerning to me. I do not wish to have my data in possession of Intuit. I realize I an delete the data, but so far as I am concerned, I don't want you to possess it. At all.
Can someone from the privacy department of Intuit please answer the question?
