businesses want to see if their ads are working. by uploading their visitor records, they can get reports of how many people who saw their ads visited the restaurant.
What does this mean?
OpenTable sounds like it would be open-source, but it appears that it isn't
I think the parent comment to yours made a sarcastic take using a variation of the popular ambiguity Free as in Beer [1] that usually differentiates between free as 0 cost and free as freedom as a reaction to the OpenTable software being free to use rather than open-source
You go into a bar, you order the IPA you liked someplace else, you see they've got a heap of cans... the bartender reaches under the bar and hands you... an open can.
No right? You don't want that one. Why the hell is it open?
Really what is happening here is that companies that advertise on Facebook push conversions to Facebook to “close the loop”.
Unless a company is advertising a service on Facebook, there is nothing to push to them for this purpose. Are there Yelp and OpenTable ads on Facebook targeting users booking reservations? Have you pulled your results and see those?
Do I read this correctly that a restaurant will just dump its complete visitor log to FB and then let FB "sort it out".
Meaning that FB gets to vacuum the info on everyone including those without FB accounts?