> Q: Anyone know if was possible for Facebook to collect info on non-members who visited Facebook sites?
Yes. If you see a page with a facebook “like” or “share” button, they know you visited that page. And they know what that page is about so they add that to your profile.
If you are a member, they add this to your FB profile. If you are not a member, they keep an “anonymous” profile. They have many ways of getting name/email/phone/zip/etc into this “anonymous” profile. But they don’t need that use what they’ve collected for targeted content and ads on other sites you visit. Most people have visited 100s or 1000s of sites with FB buttons so they have a lot of information about them and about what they do on those sites (which pages. how long do you stay on a page, ...).
And, you only have to SEE the buttons on the page. You don’t need to click them. I did some work for a HUGE company that refused to put FB buttons on websites for this reason. I was in many technical and high level (C*O) meetings with FB to try to find a solution. FB would not budge on their being able to collect visitor data even though they REALLY wanted their buttons on 10s of millions of our page views a day. They offered things like segregating data from our sites into profiles that that wouldn’t be used for anything other than targeted ad on OUR sites.
We offered to do things like collect/store the data ourself and provide them the minimum needed if one of our brands wanted to use FB targeting for a campaign (along with a fee to them to run the targeting). Since they said they only wanted data for targeted campaigns on OUR sites, but the wouldn’t accept our housing the data and paying them almost whatever they wanted when we had a targeted campaign, it was pretty obvious they wanted the data for other reasons.
I know a number of small businesses that dropped their websites in favor a Facebook page. When I explained that I was not a member and had concerns about my privacy when I visited their websites, they all have assured me that I had nothing to worry about.
I am NOT a happy camper. And if any non-member wants to look into a class action, let me know.