Maybe Facebook changed their name to "Meta" because they metastasized and became society's cancer.

The company name is telling. Metadata is data about data. Data about you. They sell that. That's their whole business. That should be enough to not want to knowingly feed them more.

You think, "but I don't use Facebook or insta or threads, so I'm safe". Not so fast. Companies want to know how effective their ad spending is on meta products, so they integrate the Facebook sdk into their apps.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-events

They are just over there sucking up data and selling it for billions. Oh and influencing elections and radicalizing our parents while their code infects apps and websites. The cancer comparison isn't far off.

. Right you are. I don't have a Facebook account or have the app installed on my phone, yet they are attempting to track data from my camera system app.

Highly recommend DuckDuckGo browser or RethinkDNS for everyone reading this (if you are on Android).

Edit: Also PiHole, though it is a bit more complicated to set up.
- Pi-hole, Ghostery, Orion browser, Kagi. This is the way.
I recently signed up for some utilities for my house and a form button wasn't working. It was a pretty basic form, I turned off ad-block to see if some traffic was being blocked or some other network error.

Well that didn't fix the button, but it did reveal a call every 2 seconds to the Facebook tracker service. Figures...

I think it was a monopoly move to avoid being broken up by the US Government, same thing happened to Google when they "became" Alphabet. It has tax and liability benefits, sketchy shell corporation tactics

But yeah the naming shower thought, yeah probably. I like that reasoning better than "metadata" and then "alphabet" since they work for alphabet soup agencies

They should change it again and call themselves Stage Four

"Became"? Always were.

It was to wipe the news cycle. It worked. Do you remember what it was? Does anyone?

I've been making that comparison since they changed names lol, you're onto something!

I reckon it happened a good while before that, but equally maybe my memory is playing tricks.

Not playing tricks. It was always like this since the "dumb fucks" comment, i.e. before it became available to everyone.
- True, but it hadn’t spread to multiple organs yet.