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Comment by rogerdickey | Hacker News Reader

Most of this happens if you 1) sign up for FB 2) install their app. If you don't do both of these things they can't track you, right?

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Even you don't sign up for FB, they keep a shadow profile on you from activity from people searching for you.

Even if you don't sign up for FB, they get your contact information from your friends. (That might just be WhatsApp, but at least one of the two gives people the "opportunity" to upload their contact list to find matches.)

Sure, FB knows a lot less about me than they could, but keeping off their radar entirely is effectively impossible.

Just loading a page that has the embedded Facebook Like button generates data points on you regarding your browsing and purchase history. I'm not sure if they can/do read the contents of a checkout form, but it would be simple to infer coarse location and strong identity from that.

You don't need to read the contents of a checkout form when the company just gives you the data. (Companies upload their customer lists, so Facebook can compute “conversions”. But, of course, Facebook doesn't let companies download the data Facebook has, and compare on their end… that would be a violation of privacy!)

False.

See Facebook "shadow profiles", data collected on persons either through third-party activity (though the profiled individual is on Facebook), OR on persons not using Facebook at all.

https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/facebook-shadow-profiles-pr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile

Unfortunately this is not true.

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