It's possible that the reduced usage from a bad experience costs less than the gain from de-anonymizing visitors. Because they are under FTC consent orders, their ability to connect shadow profiles to anonymous visitors for improved targeting may be limited, and they are willing to piss you off because that's more effective from a metric perspective.

Not saying it's the right way of doing business or that it won't bite them in the butt... but they definitely don't "need" to do it to save the business if the analytics point otherwise.