Some serious “James Bond island cave villain” stuff
This is also why many sites and apps offer verification programs as well in my understanding... Verifying a user's ID has been a practices for ages now, but it did nothing to stop the growth of disinformation because that's not what verification was for IMO.
An unregulated private company asking you for official government documentation and your real name is definitely tracking you in my opinion. Even friends commenting with your name and family associations/connections on your account can easily ID everyone.
They are not a government agency with the authority to ask people for government ID, but somehow they convinced everyone to use their real name, and it didn't stop the decay of conduct decorum on the platform, it only served to track information more accurately.
Even people who have never registered for FB are indexed by them based on tagged photos and in posts that others have made about them using their names.
They also track people based on interactions across other apps entirely not associated with FB... That's IMO why certain sites slowed and faulted mysteriously when their domain went offline.
I am willing to bet that they have a really interesting Splunk (or similar tech) dashboard they can look at and search any time they want full of analytics based on almost every human on earth.
Account privacy settings have always been a very ambiguous "shell game" with FB and other social apps, and often do not work properly, what makes anyone think a "delete account" request would ever be honored by such a company that manipulates it's user base?
I also suspect that each of the major social platforms do the same type of info gathering to varying extents as well.
This is some serious "James Bond island cave villain" stuff, and whatever congressional action comes next (if anything does) may tell us where the future is going for our privacy and personal info rights...
The only possible way people can protect themselves from being tracked and indexed by social app companies is by not sharing their data at all, by telling friends and family to not share info about them online, and by obeying all (government) laws.
Imagine a future where location tracking, where your phone is a device that you paid a lot for, but it secretly shares information with companies that you visit a specific donut shop, and in turn for that your health insurance provider has access to that information to guide them in charging you higher insurance rates, or as an excuse to deny your clam... That is only a light scenario of how your data can be unknowingly be used against you and nobody knows you're saving location data even when the setting is disabled.