They should.

Is that actual mandate from FB leadership? Between the Like buttons that track visit habits (used actively in non-FB marketing since 2014[1]), native FB visits + tracking on that, mobile tracking[2], and volunteered information, Facebook + their share widgets probably has information parity with Google + the Google Analytics aggregate information + Gmail (which has the added "benefit" of only needing one party to profile multiple people - i.e., John uses gmail and CC's 15 non-gmail users about $foo provides Gmail with a certain amount of information). The Forbes article is a really good analysis (albeit from 2014) as to the specifics of their privacy policy (which, as I understand it, doesn't give out PII, but certainly has the potential to craft an 'anonymized' profile on a user). Car insurance companies, mortgage companies, health insurance companies (fans of McDonalds!), etc could do wonders with that data[3] compared to how crude their existing metrics are.

[1] http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-web-browsing-histo...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/13/facebook-...

[3] Mortgage lending has certain 'fair lending' and anti-discriminatory practices to counteract things like reverse redlining[4] after the whole racial discriminatory scandal thing, but exploiting the law is easier than exploiting the instruction pointer on a Linux 2.2 box haha.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination#Revers...

Yep, Facebook do not want you on the internet, they want you on Facebook.

It is atrocious.

It's getting hard to tell the difference between sarcasm and real opinions on here.

Let's not forget folks, a company wanting you to use its platform is "atrocious" now.

A company wanting nearly all internet usage to be through them would be, I think.

It's kind of different than just wanting a product to be used.

The question is whether this is what they want. It seems like something similar may be.