1. customer enters their address in form fields

2. those form field values are templated into a GET request to the Meta tracking pixel (or POST request to the /events endpoint, or ...)

3. profit

they've made it very easy https://developers.facebook.com/docs/meta-pixel/implementati...

OK, based on your link the answer to my question seems to be: it's not a tracking pixel, but the "Meta Pixel", which the documentation describes as "a snippet of JavaScript code".

Welcome to the wonderful world of affiliate marketing, adtech, and tag management.

In that world, third party ‘tags’ that are included in a page are generally referred to as ‘pixels’. Sometimes they are single pixel img tags. Frequently they are scripts. But the industry calls them ‘pixels’ anyway.

It is, surprisingly, not a terribly honest industry.

Yeah semantic drift haha...

https://chatgpt.com/share/3331fdec-c69c-46b0-9ffe-c48848fb29...

I don't know why you're being downvoted, calling full access javascript embedded into a page a 'tracking pixel' is a total lie. Then again 'serverless' is where you use a server, so the track record isn't great.

I guess most people reading this already knew that the term 'tracking pixel' has evolved beyond its original meaning, and is now commonly understood to include all sorts of tracking code.

I did not, but now I know :)

(And although serverless doesn't mean 'no server', we know what the word means and it doesn't cause confusion.)

I also didn't know and I definitely don't like how it underplays the capabilities of the tracking.

>serverless

Doesn't the term confuse anyone hearing it for the first time? It sure did me.

it could have been much worse, I have seen passwords leaked this way

("seen" meaning "I worked at a company where this happened and read the code with my own eyes" not just "I read it in the newspaper")