[mtgx]

Just imagine how Facebook must have (initially) pushed the datr cookie on its engineers: "We only need to track everyone like this to check against DDoS attacks."

Still, even such an excuse should have raised alarm bells, but I assume most developers would just shrug their shoulders and develop the feature anyway, as they would've liked to keep their nice-paying job and juicy stock options.

In reality, Facebook only recently used the DDoS protection excuse for its datr cookie, well after it announced that the cookie would be used for advertising purposes, which also happened a few years after the cookie was introduced.

I imagine whatever Facebook told developers then was even less subtle than "using it for security purposes", and that most of the developers figured it out right then that the datr cookie would be one day used to track users across the web for advertising purposes.

[lexicality]

I'm pretty sure people who work for Facebook are completely aware of the company's methodologies and are completely OK with it.

The conversation would be more along the lines of "We need to track people who aren't logged in, suggestions?"