Yes, You Should Delete Facebook
tl;dr Guy who had researched Soylent got targeted by ads for one of their competitors, called Ample, and uses that as a basis as to why you should delete Facebook.<p>Really?  My guess is that he wound up on a page with the FB pixel as a result of a Soylent search.  Ample was likely running a Lookalike audience ad.  It doesn&#x27;t take any sort of deep knowledge, illegal&#x2F;immoral data processing, or any other of the nefarious things he is implying to make that connection.<p>Let&#x27;s remember that Ample didn&#x27;t actually ever have this guy&#x27;s data.  An algorithm on Facebook&#x27;s side said &quot;this guy lives in San Franscisco, has lots of friends in startups, and has searched for articles related to Soylent before&quot; and showed him an ad based on targeting parameters setup by Ample.  This is all data that he voluntarily gave to Facebook.  Unless he clicked on the ad and then voluntarily entered his personal information into the Ample&#x27;s site, Ample does not and will never know anything about him, including whether or not he ever was shown their ad.<p>If you want to avoid this kind of thing, unfortunately deleting Facebook is just the beginning.  You&#x27;ll have to never search the internet (all sites that you click on from any search engine know what you were searching for when you click over), turn off all cookies (which means you can never log in, anywhere), and disable javascript.  That doesn&#x27;t even begin to address the elephant in the room: your ISP knows just about everything you do.<p>The genie is out of the bottle.  Referrers are sent by browsers.  The Internet works by first connecting to a network provider, which means they know everything you do.  Even in the world of SSL everywhere, DNS queries provide a very telling map of your behavior. 
 Almost all sites rely on cookies at least for login purposes, and those can be used to track your behavior.  Just want to disable third party cookies?  Go ahead.  How long will it be until a service shows up for sites to band together and correlate their first party cookies with info about your IP and achieve the same mission?<p>So if you&#x27;re worried enough about your privacy to delete Facebook, then it&#x27;s hypocritical of you to be reading this message on the Internet at all.  You should not be accessing the Internet if you do not want to be tracked.