Is that actual mandate from FB leadership? Between the Like buttons that track visit habits (used actively in non-FB marketing since 2014[1]), native FB visits + tracking on that, mobile tracking[2], and volunteered information, Facebook + their share widgets probably has information parity with Google + the Google Analytics aggregate information + Gmail (which has the added "benefit" of only needing one party to profile multiple people - i.e., John uses gmail and CC's 15 non-gmail users about $foo provides Gmail with a certain amount of information). The Forbes article is a really good analysis (albeit from 2014) as to the specifics of their privacy policy (which, as I understand it, doesn't give out PII, but certainly has the potential to craft an 'anonymized' profile on a user). Car insurance companies, mortgage companies, health insurance companies (fans of McDonalds!), etc could do wonders with that data[3] compared to how crude their existing metrics are.

[1] http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-web-browsing-histo...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/13/facebook-...

[3] Mortgage lending has certain 'fair lending' and anti-discriminatory practices to counteract things like reverse redlining[4] after the whole racial discriminatory scandal thing, but exploiting the law is easier than exploiting the instruction pointer on a Linux 2.2 box haha.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination#Revers...

Yep, Facebook do not want you on the internet, they want you on Facebook.

It is atrocious.