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One thing that would help these small businesses would be SDK of sorts that would help them do proper attribution themselves.

Something that would help tie an ad click to an actual purchase or an app download.

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Right now, that's extremely difficult to do without leaking private data. Google and Facebook experimented with it for a while, but both killed the test products because it would require them to trust advertisers with data that could easily be de-anonymized. It's kind of a funny twist that Google and Facebook are able to avoid offering this in the name of user privacy, while the advertising industry is begging them to share more user data.

That said, they're all part of an industry consortium that's working on differential privacy algorithms that will ideally allow businesses to check each other's attribution without actually sharing the personal data involved. https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developer...

I thought the pixel was exactly this?

The pixel would be controlled by FB which in this case isn't incentivized to give you true results. I'm assuming the parent comment meant some kind of independent SDK.

Of course when it comes to the GDPR both would be illegal unless proper, informed consent has been obtained beforehand.

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