Yeah, that article is very apologetic for Facebook... but the problem is that they do take what you don't give them.

Heck, they'll build an advertising profile on you even if you don't have a Facebook account, and they'll add to your profile even if you're logged out.

There's also all sorts of problems with the data their mobile apps pull out of your phone.

I wrote a batch script that writes to your hosts file a bunch of tracking URLs which are designed to take data from non users in order to enrich the 'social graph' of people who are either logged out or don't have FB accounts. Please ignore all the flask stuff for now; I plan to turn it into a SaaS app that writes to your host files and continually pushes new tracking URLs as I discover them: https://github.com/jtbarker/nofbtracking (btw the irony of me sharing this on a social site for programming is not lost on me).

How is this different from the infamous http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm ?

More geared toward people who don't know how to write to hosts files.

I find it disingenous if you claim "continually pushes new tracking URLs as I discover them" and not give the upstream credit.

This is fair, then my system will give credit. V1 of this list is here: https://qz.com/1234502/how-to-block-facebook-all-the-urls-yo...

That is a long list!