[titzer]

I'm not surprised. Honestly, I stopped trusting them years ago, so pretty much all the words out of their mouths I consider to be BS. I'm not even sure why people apologize for creepy-ass multi-billion dollar companies that treat their users like products and study them like labrats.

I'm looking forward to technical solutions to verifiably disable and prevent this kind of tracking.

To those talking about "tracking UI usage": do a UX study. Sit some people down and watch how they use the site. Ask them questions about what works and what doesn't. Stop spying. You got all this damn money and you can't be bothered to actually lift a finger to do some difficult work that involves interacting with all those "dirty" people out there. FFS most people would probably be happy to fill out a survey if it actually would impact the product in a positive way. Creepiness is creepy.

[brlewis]

I am not affiliated with Facebook myself; I barely use it, but given how big it is I bet they do user studies in addition to metrics collection. Metrics alone leave out important parts of the human element, but user studies alone are a biased sample.

[rohit2412]

Given the speed and comfort of not doing user studies, I expect "move fast and break things" Facebook to not care about user studies at all

[jartelt]

I know several UX researchers at facebook. Yes, they do in person user studies.