Posting photos of your vacations in 5-star palaces or of your new Audi car on Facebook: this is a habit that can encourage the tax authorities to look into your case. As Presse Citron notes, the Council of State chose, on Friday July 22, 2022, to validate a system tested for two years by the government. This consists of examining the photos of Internet users on Facebook and Twitter as well as the advertisements posted on Le Bon Coin, with the aim of detecting possible tax fraud.
In practice, social media users who go out of their way to show off their dream existence on a daily basis could have cause for concern if they do not respect the law. Indeed, tax and customs officials can fully examine their tax situation if they have the impression that there is a discrepancy between the declared income and the displayed lifestyle.
Photo metadata, which includes the date and geolocation of the scene taken, can provide them with valuable information. These pictures can help identify a false tax domiciliation. Same thing if you have not made a declaration of work beforehand to build a large swimming pool in your garden.
If few people are aware of the existence of this provision, it is because it was previously tested on an experimental basis under article 154 of the 2020 finance law. The latter points out that the services of the State are authorized to “collect and use by means of computerized and automated processing (…) the content, freely accessible on the websites of online platform operators (…) clearly made public”. Once the clues suggesting fraud have been gathered, the data is transmitted to the service agents of the general directorate of public finances or customs.
An article that does not please the association La Quadrature du Net, which accuses it of interfering with the privacy of Internet users. In 2019, she called on parliamentarians to seize the Constitutional Council to request the abolition of this measure, deemed to be “a disproportionate attack on the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression”.
