True, Gary, they cannot read other sites cookies but they have something very close to the equivalent. 

They don't have to tell you that they are sending your data to facebroke with every click, if they are small enough to make less than 25 million in total revenue and they are not doing business outside of North America.. 

Every click sends boatloads of low level information about your browser, your IP address, your operating system, and other fun details ( use tcp dump and see for yourself ) that they store and match up with other requests they get when you browse another site using face broke plugins, even with a different private browser session, that match up with the first and identify you. They build this profile and follow you all over the internet, with some reasonable certainty that it is you. 

To me, it's very poor judgment for any person, and especially any company, to use any Meta / face broke products, in 2025 given what we now know, even though it may be perfectly legal. But that is a different discussion. 

OK. They have a cookie.  I'm not at their site, they can't read it.  They can't read other sites cookies either.  That's the spec.

I have to go to their site or use an associated site, to pick up the pixel.  I didn't do that.

There is no magic.:)  

Regardless of all that tracking, how would they know my query/request?  

To me, the only reasonable answer is that Google and Facebook share info behind the scenes, i.e. directly.

As I understand it, a tracking pixel works because it is on the page you visit.  It comes from, .let's say, Facebook's server, and they know the page that requested it.  And they can get the info in the request header.  To know who you are, whoever wrote the page has to have known  who you are and encoded that in the pixlel somehow, maybe through it's name, or some other attribute.

I haven't really been following a lot of the changes that have been made to store more information in caches on browsers.  I'm wondering if there is something going on there.  I really don't like the fact that browsers have taken this direction.

Perhaps I need to look at those specs and see what is going on.

On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 09:10:47PM -0800, Diego R. Martinez wrote:

Facebook tends to have cookies in your browser and advertising pixels that

basically track everything you do.

And the thing about it is that, once you're in their system, you will get

tracked for life. So that probably explains that...

On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 8:56 PM <saclug@garymcglinn.com> wrote:

I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked.

And, I thought I understood many or most of them.

But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on

Stoicism."  The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an

idea of what Gemini can do.

A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting

that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group.

WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many

notifications or messages I have.

AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with

Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel.

Am I missing something?  Everything I know suggest that I would have had

to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt

of an email from Facebook.  Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before

my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in

the interim.  AFAIK, those things didn't happen.

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