The second part of your question reflects what is probably the most common misconception about Facebook. We don’t share your information with advertisers. Our targeting is anonymous. We don’t identify or share names. Period. Think of a magazine selling ads based on the demographics and perceived interests of its readers. We don’t sell the subscriber list. We protect the names.
Except when we don’t, like when we made every person’s name indexable by google by default. Or when we gave your name to Microsoft when you visited their new docs site. Which you had to do to opt out of our latest ‘personalization’ scheme.
Exactly!! This is maddening. I know this. The targeting is anonymous but it’s still information that we did not ASK to be shared. I know this because I have a Facebook fan page, and I have access to all the data of my fans via Facebook’s developer API. Luckily for my fans, I’m not evil and I don’t intend to use all that information. But the point remains, it’s there. And my fans did not opt for that information to be shared with me or anyone else, ever. Facebook simply made it so, and oops — didn’t tell them.