Italian tax authorities argue that user registrations with X, LinkedIn and Meta platforms should be seen as taxable transactions as they imply the exchange of a membership account in return for a user’s personal data.
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The case could ultimately be extended to the 27-nation European Union since VAT is a harmonised EU tax, and force a rethink of the business model of the tech industry.
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The Italian approach could affect almost all companies, from airlines to supermarkets to publishers, who link access to free services on their sites to users’ acceptance of profiling cookies.
That breaks my idea about taxes but why not? Governments insist to tax even the transactions where money wasn’t involved so why not tax personal data transfer?
Eh
Money is not involved directly. User signs away permission to use their data, receives access to service in return.
The company then turns that data into money.
Trading is already taxed though. Otherwise no company on this planet would ever purchase anything and switch to gold as a currency.
Just because it’s personal data traded for a service doesn’t make it any less of a taxable trade.
I think there’s a very strong argument here that this transaction should be taxed in Italy when Italian citizens currently in Italy partake in that transaction.
That’s something that is definitely not happening (not that they are being taxed sufficiently elsewhere either, lol).
Interesting. Digital property tax.
I’m not against big tech being taxed by the EU, but this seems a little far fetched imho
We have been discussing this for a while (I work in finance). I have not made a final opinion on that, but the idea is not so far fetched (to use your word) as it seems in my humble opinion. The private data we are giving to tech company have a monetary value very much as we would pay money. I don’t say (yet) it should be taxed, though. I am not yet sure, but I wouldn’t reject the idea entirely either.
But then wouldn’t it make sense to tax their income / profit; after they converted our data to a monetary value (to use your word)?
Question would be how to track sales of said data outside of Italy.
Yes, income tax in another topic, though. The point here is VAT, which is a consumption tax. These are two different things. It wouldn’t affect the income tax regime.
