It's worse than that. FB maintains "phantom accounts" for <i>everybody</i> whether you have a FB account or not.<p>I've never had a FB account, but some years ago I got an email from FB listing a number of my friends and family and saying, "All these people have FB accounts. Wouldn't you like to join FB?"<p>The email included a reply option labeled "don't contact me again," which I chose and then replied. But a few months later I got the same invitation.<p>Needless to say, I found that to be deeply disturbing, and it confirmed my determination to never subscribe to FB. Later I learned about the phantom accounts. I'm sure FB maintains a dossier on me to this day.
This is why I simply maintain my own FB profile but portray my interests so poorly it’ll never be of any value to Facebook advertisers.<p>It works, too, the ads I get are so wildly irrelevant it’s comical.
Anti-Zuckerberg specific legislation might be good to start looking into, I think. Say what you will about "but corporate culture". Zuck is a known manipulator and liar and he has to be stopped before he does anything else that harms the world
This [0] talk from Computer Chaos Club also points out how all applications that use Facebook as authentication option (or even without it) MUST send user data to Facebook Inc. This of course doesn't require a user to have a facebook account.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc</a>
I deleted my Facebook account in 2008 and never went back. I deeply dislike and distrust Facebook.<p>That said, it is relevant that they only do this for "deactivated" accounts, and not "deleted" accounts. To give them the benefit of the doubt, those states are different, and <i>if</i> they communicated what they meant by each state, it would be fine with me if they continued tracking people until they actually deleted their accounts.<p>The problem is that they don't communicate it very well — they didn't back in 2008, and it sounds like they don't do it much better today. That's the sneaky part, not the tracking itself. Well, the tracking is sneaky, don't get me wrong, but if you're on Facebook in 2022, you must know about it and have accepted at some level that it is happening.<p>I also remember actually getting them to delete my account for good was not trivial. There was a waiting period, and a lot of different ways to accidentally opt out. To be honest, I initially read this article thinking it had been discovered that they were tracking "deleted" users in addition to "deactivated" users this whole time, and it didn't surprise me at all.
By various social interactions I've been basically forced to create Facebook account, as one of the groups use Messenger for catching up. The first friends suggestions were all people who have my mobile number in their addressbook. I haven't leaked to these leeches any other phone number than my own. Now having nothing in common with US of A my various data are owned by and traded by an American company with American intelligence agencies having direct access to them. Americans you suck.
Equifax, Nexis Lexis, Clearview etc all collect your data without you ever making an account. And actually collect highly sensitive information.<p>What you describe is a feature of the US economy.