It's part of the onboarding of any Facebook Ads user (i.e., advertiser) to implement the Facebook Pixel on their site.
Without it you're not going to achieve much on Facebook as you need to feedback their system when a particular ad had an impact so that they can model the ad delivery accordingly and get you more converting users. Whatever your conversion is (viewing a page, registering, purchasing).
What this highlights is that it is damn simple to be a poor developer yet achieve a particular goal. You can brute force your way towards that goal, ignoring any sort of costly 'useless' security, usability or user privacy aspects. Even more so if you're a criminal. GDPR|CCPA < INTERPOL!
This is never going to end. This is true for criminal orgs but also legit businesses that despite regulations will mostly prioritize features to their customers over less tangible/monetizable value like hardened infrastructure and updated software.
Maybe I'm wrong and this cluster was left exposed for another reason, though.
This article is brushing a lot of stuff very fast. In reality there is much more to it:
1. You don't need to visit Facebook properties for them to link your activity to you. Unless you're a brand new user and they have never finger printed you...
2. Referrer might be in the pixel tracker, but there is way more to that, including product IDs, product costs, your stage in the funnel (have you Added to Cart but not Purchased?), product category, etc.
3. Everytime a Facebook owned property (or piece of: Like button, FB connect) is 'used' by a device you use, then you can be sure the relation between you and that Pixel call is made (ahem, improved).
Install the Chrome Extension Facebook Pixel Helper, and check what happens when you use an ecom site. You'll be amazed to see what is shared with Facebook (no PII though).
Yes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice.
It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.
Related. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently.
It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years.
When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.
The real question is who invested, and why? Even though being an investor doesn't mean being smart at it, it's still a signal that those guys are/were onto something and needed the cash to accelerate/deploy. $3.5M for such a small remote team though... I'm not running the numbers but they were cash burning big time, for a long time.
This is such a good news for tumblr. It's sad that key internet services like del.icio.us, tumblr, and I'm sure others got destroyed be Yahoo! But, it's good to see that some managed to stay alive and might have another life after having been Yahoo!'d
Jira is the primary target of the article when it probably should be how people run agile projects, and how organizations tend to struggle findind the most efficient (software development) processes to reach their business goals.
This article could have been written for any similar Jira direct / indirect competitors like you mentioned, and the like of Asana, Trello (Atlassian), Aha, plain old Word, Excel and so many others.
But it wasn't, because it's just easier to pick the elephant in the room and have a go at what remains a great tool when used wisely. Kind of like pen and paper, after all.
In the UK I sometimes pay for a single Banana by card, 50p (0.6€).
When I do, I wonder if the highest carbon footprint was from the payment processing or the banana processing!