Which means they are also using other types of information to identify you, and since your email and phone number can't be used, it must be those other information types. I'd love to know what they are.
My count is 11,885 advertisers, for what it's worth. It looks like car dealerships are the majority of them... I've never bought a car from a dealership. Very odd.
I wonder if the linking is even necessary, if FBs dark pattern made your friends upload their contact list, they could just infer that since Alice and Bob are your FB friends and they both have your name and number on their uploaded contacts, they can probably associate that number with your FB profile with x% certainty (a higher percentage if your FB friends Cedric, Dave, Emily and Fritz also have the same name and number...).
Fun stuff huh? /s Someone should associate that Patrick Stewart "Extras" line "But it's too late, I've seen everything." with Mr. Zuckhole.
> I wonder if the linking is even necessary, if FBs dark pattern made your friends upload their contact list, they could just infer that since Alice and Bob are your FB friends and they both have your name and number on their uploaded contacts, they can probably associate that number with your FB profile with x% certainty (a higher percentage if your FB friends Cedric, Dave, Emily and Fritz also have the same name and number...).
Yeah, my bet's on this. Once, long ago, when I was more trusting, I installed the Facebook app on my phone (back when Android permissions were all or nothing). Facebook slurped up my address book, and I don't even think they ever explicitly asked for permission to do that.
About six months to a year ago I noticed these contacts in my FB data dump...and they were connected to all kinds email addresses and phone numbers I never had in my address book.
My guess is that if you want to keep Facebook from linking to your personal info from other sources, you need to have zero data overlap (different email, phone, name) and never install any of their apps on any device you own and never share a browser session between Facebook and any other browsing.
One auto dealer worker responded to my question, "how did my name get on a list that your page uploaded?" by saying "I don't know, I just post ads."
The ad settings page suggests that usually the uploaded identifying information is a phone number or email address, but the wording is vague enough that it could probably be just about anything. So if you've ever shared your phone number with Facebook (even once, I suspect, even if you've since deleted it) I wouldn't be surprised if they use that to identify you. Similarly, a postal address or even a city might enough to identify you for these purposes.
Edit: A quick Google shows a number of groups similar to [1] that sell lists of auto owners. I would be surprised if there were not similar groups for other industries, particularly real estate.
[1] https://hedgescompany.com/consumer-automotive-mailing-lists/
(NB: There are very valid reasons WHY this information is in the public record...mostly to make it harder to fence stolen vehicles.)