If you check out Upsolve.org because you are considering bankruptcy due to any sort of reason, there is a tool to help you evaluate whether bankruptcy is appropriate at my.upsolve.org/bankruptcy-screener. (Don’t click that before reading more.)

Bankruptcy is a difficult choice. Sometimes people pursue it as a result of medical debt or other extremely personal reasons.

Upsolve.org bills itself as an organization that help the poor. Unlike a lawyer’s office, it can help people without charging a lot and unlike a lawyer’s office, there is no duty of confidentiality or privilege.

However, someone taking a screening tool might be providing information just to see if bankruptcy is even possible. And Upsolve.org sells or gives this information to Facebook. Even if it’s not selling the screener results, just someone landing on this page, combined with IP gives Facebook valuable information.

The user who goes there without their IP protected could later get ads for predatory financial companies to “help” debtors and importantly, this information can be sold to data brokers to determine that the people viewing the site are a credit risk.

For example, if someone gets into a car accident and needs 90,000 worth of medical care over two weeks. They get the bill after the two weeks of medical care. They are going to be unable to work for a while and they are considering bankruptcy. The 90,000 has not gone to collections. This person is technically still employed but will need a lot of time off. They may not even be able to go back to work.

Normally, if this person decided not to declare bankruptcy and to wait 4 months and hopefully go back to work, they might be able to get a loan from a bank. But if Facebook has sold their info (person with this IP identified is a person interested in bankruptcy information) to data brokers, and the bank has access to that information, that loan will be denied.

Real consequences can happen from selling shit like this to Facebook. Worst of all, the Facebook analytics aren’t on the main page and instead are hidden in the screener.

Although Upsolve.org probably just wants to target users online with ads about how great its service is, and it’s actually a service that can help many save a ton of money, it may be overlooking the privacy risk. I hate seeing scripts like this in pages for things that should be confidential, things like abortion clinics, addiction treatment clinics, financial help pages, and pages related to mental health. All of that fucking info gets monetized the second someone hits the page if there are analytics in the page. It would be one thing if that info only resulted in helpful services being sold, but it also is given to companies building profiles on people which can wind up in the hands of surveillance state government officials, financial industry decision makers, and others that classify people based on browsing habits.

I may be wrong about this and facebook doesn’t sell that specific “looking at possible bankruptcy” data to data brokers. I can’t be sure. But I wish I didn’t have to wonder. And they probably do. And it probably does go to financial institutions somehow, ultimately hurting some people who were merely considering bankruptcy but don’t ultimately do it.