This feels like an almost intentional misunderstanding.
This sentence, your thesis, is absurd. Where does it say they make money from selling data?
Furthermore, "I guess they can’t afford to cover costs given current prices" is a really strange foundation to leap from. Do you have any facts? Or are you just speculating on BackBlaze and making wild assumptions?
> now that other like-minded crazies can find each other faster than ever
You are right, there is nowhere else online where "crazies" gather - not 4chan, not reddit, not voat, not twitter, just Facebook?
What would be their motivation for just giving their customers data to Facebook for free?
But the previous two points make no difference on why tracking is baked into an internal portal so I speculated as to the reasoning as anyone would do — it’s not a stretch to think that data owners could sell customer data to an aggregator like Facebook for an additional line item of revenue.
Because it does? There are valid reasons for using the pixel in advertising.
This is plain wrong. One of the reasons I was a fan of B2 was their tech and how they achieved such low costs:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-and-cloudflare-part...
While this FB pixel debacle is obviously a very big screw up, it's pretty much a "screw up" and unintentional from what I understand so far. And they have fixed it already which is a positive step towards redemption.
From my speculation - the screw up seems to have happened from including the googletagmanager. They probably only wanted it to stay on the home page of B2 (for ad conversion tracking if I were to guess), not on the dashboard itself after login. The screw up caused it to be on the dashboard too.