Author failed to do any research, instead of going for the typical "FB is doing something secretive and cryptic" angle. Related links that explain this:
This hn thread is a perfect example of a news bubble. Googling "fbclid" returns the answer in the first result, but hn votes up an article that has no information and treats it as some secret tracking that fb has implemented. HN is excessively biased against any discussion of tracking/analytics on the internet. The community allows no room for true discussion - only blatantly biased opinions.
This article was posted days before any of the links you've given.
According to the metadata for the site, it was originally published on 2018-10-14 and last updated 2018-10-16.
Facebook's own article about the feature came out 5 days after this article was published. So, at the time, Facebook _was_ being secretive about it. Aside from that one line, the entire article reads more like "this is new, I wonder what it does".
Lastly, when I googled "fbclid" the top 3 articles are completely unrelated to Facebook (but, then, I'm not in marketing so this doesn't surprise me) and the forth is this very article.
That is fair, I didn't check when the author posted.
The first link (for me) when googling fbclid is the reddit post in r/analytics I linked to, which doesn't have a ton of info but gives more than what the author had. Though you're correct, it was posted after the author originally posted, and I can't fault him/her for not checking in again a few days later.
Not really seeing the comments here as jumping to the conclusion that this is a totally secretive and nefarious practice. I think most people here are used to links being instrumented with tracking of this sort.
Your first two links don't contain any technical information about the "fbclid" parameter. They can be read to understand why Facebook does it, but not how. I see how it is useful to get this info when I'm paying Facebook for views. But that's something different from understanding how it works. So articles like this are needed to piece together what is going on.
Now the interesting question will be whether "fbclid" can be tied to individuals. And I couldn't readily find this info in the links you posted. Maybe I'm bad at reading?
According to the metadata for the site, it was originally published on 2018-10-14 and last updated 2018-10-16.
Facebook's own article about the feature came out 5 days after this article was published. So, at the time, Facebook _was_ being secretive about it. Aside from that one line, the entire article reads more like "this is new, I wonder what it does".
Lastly, when I googled "fbclid" the top 3 articles are completely unrelated to Facebook (but, then, I'm not in marketing so this doesn't surprise me) and the forth is this very article.