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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

This essay is just wrong.

Just because a person ends up on an advertiser's site after clicking on an add targeted to [whatever] doesn't mean the advertiser has the data. It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad.

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Of course it does. That is the whole point of the article. By clicking on a targeted ad, the info used to target you can be and also is very much transferred. Just imagine a string attached to the ad URL containing the characteristics of the targeted group:

    &woman=1&age=24&location=Seattle&sexor=bi&interested=[cars,skiing,succulents]&relstatus=single&...

"It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad."

They might not have your name and address (yet), but they've likely taken a browser fingerprint which can eventually be used to de-anonymize you.

"Likely" is a strong word there. For most organizations, I'd go with "might have." But yes, that's true.

Still, "Facebook tells you which ad someone clicked on, and that can give you some demographic information, and if you can at some later point determine that person's identity you can connect the two" is a very different thing from "Facebook sells your data."

It might be different from a technical perspective, but from a privacy perspective information about the user has been transferred to the advertiser, who paid Facebook for the privilege. And "at some later point" may not be that far-fetched, if the adtech company operating the fingerprinting code happens to sell their data to other companies, etc.

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