A few years ago I was in a mall in boca raton. I was in the tesla store sitting in the drivers seat of a tesla playing with all the fart noises etc when I looked up (the car faced out the store window into the mall corridor) and saw a sea of people running for their life and screaming, literally trampling each other and tripping. I jumped out the window of the car and locked myself in the back office with the other people who were in the store. We were there for almost an hour before the police came and escorted us out. They ran us through a back hallway that connected to all of the stores and lead to a loading dock where we exited into the parking lot. We passed the SWAT team as they were coming into the building. Across the street from the mall at a restaurant we heard a young girl who had heard the shots and got separated from her mom. I called my parents, told them I was safe, and a few hours got on my plane and headed back to Newark.

When my plane landed and I took my phone off of airplane mode, I googled the Boca Raton mass shooting and the headline read “popped balloon mistaken for active shooter causes mass hysteria”.

It’s fascinated me ever since that the fear of being shot is just below the surface enough that once one person ignited it, it spread throughout an entire mall like a contagious disease.

You can still buy plastic bags online. They just don’t give them out for free at grocery stores anymore. 15 dollars for 300 on Amazon.

I don't know what to tell you. Personally it doesn't feel unethical to me. There are zero negative outcomes for me because of it. I understand the rules of the game and I consent to playing it by visiting websites. Instead of random ads I get more targeted ads, why would I lose any sleep over that?

PBA cards are also considered "unethical" to some, but you still gotta get in the car and drive to work. My advice if you are really concerned with your privacy is to not use websites that have pixels installed. You can also use VPNs and other means to further prevent companies from following your consumer habits. For 99.9999% of people, this is a non-issue, and they are confused when people tell them "Facebook is stealing your data" because it's not really as nefarious as everyone makes it seem.

A lot of sites require you to consent in the form of a "This site uses cookies" popup. Ever seen one of those?

You say the site is "completely unrelated to Facebook". The site itself is the one that chooses to install the pixel, in order to extract profit via data collection itself. You can put equal blame on the site owner. Again, assume this is happening to every single commercial website you visit. You are consenting by just going there, because by now you should understand, this is how the internet is monetized.

I work in digital marketing. I understand very well how pixels work. The data it collects is used for advertising, that's it. Nobody cares what kind of porn you watch. It's just how the internet is monetized.

Think of it like this – one of those "drop your business card in and win a $100 dollar gift card" things at restaurants. The restaurant is going to take your contact information and do something with it. Maybe they will put you on an email list for the restaurant. Maybe the company owns a bunch of restaurants and it will send you coupons for other places they own. Maybe they will sell the contact information to another local business as you are active in the area and have money to spend. This stuff happens all the time. They're not "stealing" your data, you opted to give it to them in the first place.

I am definitely a “classic Reddit user”. My gripe isn’t with you specifically. But there are so many people that still think that “Facebook is stealing my data”. Pictures all over the internet with Zuckerberg over a red background like he’s some sort of authoritarian spy master. It baffles me.

You don't have to look far to see braindead people on the internet who have no concept of how businesses work.

Paywalls and collecting data for advertisers (aka "tracking") are two of the major ways that online publishers make money. How can they run a site without any revenue?