Nope haha, just their Facebook app on their mobile phones is needed to grab all the data. And once logged in, Facebook will actually track the user’s phone usage and their Internet usage as data without the user knowing. To add to their pile to analyze the user.

This also includes Instagram and Whatsapp. Meta’s other products.

Not participating in any of their products so your data is not their raw resource is good, keep it that way.

Evidently they are still pulling enough users and click through rates to warrant their reputation in advertising. Whether or not some numbers are propped up by bots, who’s to know.

Imagine billions of people depending on their platforms, and most of them will be accessing it through their official mobile apps which generally will be harder to block ads on, and most people will not seek out those methods. It’s the reason they push their official app so much. For some it is a lower priority for them, and some may even enjoy targeted advertising.

There are platforms like YouTube where you can pay to opt out of seeing ads, which is also another revenue stream.

They are paid by advertisers that want to sell you things and ideas. Google and Meta’s job is to keep you on their platform as long as possible so you can be served more advertisements. And to keep you dependent on their free platform to gather more data about what you like and your behavior patterns to easily influence and predict what advertisements grab your interest.

And because they have the data on you to know exactly who you are and what you may like, it’s valuable for advertisers because they know their cat litter advertisement is going to be shown to someone who very obviously has a cat through all their activities and interactions on the platform.

The more time I live on this earth, the more I see so many aspects of it is that “different strokes for different folks” apply to. So much conflict has been started because people wanting to force some ideal/correct/only way of doing things on another.