You have rather succinctly noted that sodding huge walled off communities come and go, with time. ::FAC3:B00C: is already very old school and largely irrelevant. They just haven't noticed yet.
Source? It's always been my understanding that while smaller players do this, the major ad players - Meta, Google, etc - never do this: Data on everyone is their greatest competitive advantage, and they don't want to give it away!
You don't have, but many sites you visit have a Facebook code hidden in their pages that sends data about any visitor to Facebook. Thus Facebook knows a lot about you even if you don't have an account.
I'll answer but I don't think you want one/it... They're different. That's why. Simple.
One you're giving them information/still seeing ads
The other, they're guessing and you're free from the mind rot. Distance surely hurts their accuracy.
Can't stop them guessing but you can stop being their authoritative source. You've heard the whole, "we're in charge of our response, not the problem", right?
That's a great answer, thank you! Yeah, "someone non-consensually has low-accuracy information on me" is experientially different than "someone is using (more-accurate) information on me to serve me ads". The former's still not _great_ (they can still pass that information to other people which could lead to bad experiences), but it's still much better than the latter. Thanks for the clarification!
I have a hard time believing that Facebook does a particularly good job with its shadow profiles. They can't even figure out which continent I live on or narrow my age down to more than a couple decades off.
For the times I need to wade thru the muck mbasic + adblock means the only ads I see are recommended groups. Those are usually history geeks focused on cities thousands of miles away from anywhere I've been in the past decade.
