Ad driven journalism is not great for readers. Lots of clickbait, very little substance, baseless conclusions, hand wavy numbers, etc. But it made the frontpage of HN so I guess their SEO is spot on.
As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR).
Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this.
And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here.
Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.
I don't think users take much issue with services collecting data that they feed directly into the system. I find it hard to believe anyone would not expect Facebook to be aware of what their users are doing within Facebook's walls. Personally, I'm very aware of this, and keep this in mind when choosing what data I feed any given service.
The issue has always been that Facebook is tracking you on non-Facebook websites and apps, even if you don't have a Facebook account. From a user's perspective, they never told Facebook what products they were looking at on Etsy, so Facebook collecting that data feels like a violation of their privacy. Things like GDPR and Apple's new IDFA policy do neuter this considerably.
As others are pointing out, people sign in to Facebook apps. As soon as they do, that apple & google device ID are kind of redundant. The only place where these ids are useful is when users use other application to access content and the analytics for that somehow end up in Facebook's data lake. That is indeed something they've been doing as well but also something that has been getting harder due to increasing restrictions both technically and legally (e.g. GDPR).
Facebook might huff and puff a little but they'll be fine. What this will accomplish however is decimating the competition that lack their own walled gardens from which to gather tracking data and are very dependent on Google and Facebook telling them who is who. Which is also why Google is doing this.
And of course the latter two have had a strategy of strengthening the walls around their walled gardens. This will likely push more content providers inside these walls. I'm hoping the EU and the US might be able to force tearing these walls down a little. Google trying to monopolize news has been something they've been fighting for a while. And of course both Facebook and Google are creating a bit of a privileged/exclusive situation for themselves here.
Of course it will be years before most of their users get to play with Android 12. So, it's going to be slow process of this gradually getting harder for companies to work with rather than an overnight cut off. Unless of course they roll this out to older versions as well.