Gunes Acar:

“Automatic advanced matching is a feature of the Facebook pixel that more accurately matches online visitors and their activities to Facebook users. When this feature is enabled, the pixel extracts and hashes personal data that’s entered into forms, such as an email address, phone number, name, date of birth, etc. Facebook then uses those (hashed) identifiers to link your Facebook profile to your website visits and activities. 

The advantage of using this over cookies is that as a user you can remove or block cookies. Many browsers like Safari and Firefox now automatically block tracking-related cookies, and there are ongoing efforts to phase out third-party cookies. This means that identifiers based on email address or phone number—that are global, unique, and persistent—will likely become more important.

Facebook claims to collect this personal information from the website forms when the user clicks the submit button, but we found that it instead collects it when you click virtually any button or link on the page. For example, even if you just type in your email address and maybe you change your mind and decide to go back to another page or read the privacy policy before opening an account, once you click any link or any button, Facebook will extract your personal information, including email address, from the form, hash it, and send it to its servers. 

We also found that TikTok was using a similar method to collect personal data typed into forms. TikTok has a product called TikTok Pixel, which also has a feature to automatically harvest form data. When you type in your email address or phone number on a form, clicking almost any button triggers data collection by TikTok.”

My dream is for people to drop out from these major websites, but stay online. Keep the urge for connection and sharing that makes social media so appealing, but satisfy the urge in individual, unique, wonderful ways. I want people to maintain personal sites in the same way they wrote zines. I want people to share homemade music through homemade social networks, and to create both just for the pure love of it. I want our personalities to come through not just in the words or links we share, but in the URLS we use and the code we write. I dream of regional communities forming online, based around organically grown web rings, and for idiosyncrasies to form in the aesthetics of our sites based on the communities we learned to code from. Basically, to bring back all the things that made the early internet so exciting and open and welcoming. It's a little bit harder, but that's part of the charm. It means the connections you make are intentional, and everything you create and share online will always be yours, because you made everything yourself.