True, but if you don’t have an actual Facebook account, it’s significantly harder to associate this profile with an actual person.
Of course, Google and Amazon do the same thing and I’m always logged in to those sites, so I’ve lost all pretense of anonymity a long long time ago, even with tracker-blockers installed in my web browsers.
Not hard at all. They can match your fairly unique machine environment (available via browser), pretty much a fingerprint, supplied when a Facebook beacon or image is loaded. Then they combine with info from other cooperative sites that also have the Facebook beacon or image, plus maybe DO each have some of your profile info. Both allow Facebook to query their cookie on your machine for matchup, or FB uses the “fingerprint” data. Add that to easily correlated info from aggregator sites, and they’ve precisely found out all about you and can track your ongoing browsing habits.
Agree completely with Dana. They may not be able to always associate with one actual person, but clearly they can easily trace back to a household or computer/device. Since I’m now the only Internet user in my household, there is no question that I could be easily tracked. That’s why I spent the time to do everything I could to prevent those cookies from ever being installed.
This is true, and they can also track behavior when someone is offline as well by using location data. The “ad account” they refer to covers the entire spectrum of their advertising network, which includes who are not, or never have been, members of Facebook or any other of their other sites, including You Tube, Instagram, etc.
“Before your campaign starts, you must create an offline event set in Events Manager and associate it with an ad account. Then, during your campaign, upload interaction data from your physical store locations to Events Manager. For a more automated process, you can also upload offline conversion data directly with the Offline Conversions API or Partner Integrations. Once you’ve uploaded your data, you can see the number of offline conversions attributed to people who saw or clicked your ads.”
Even after Facebook was strong armed to make face recognition an option rather than a default, and earlier this year they had to pay a $550 million to settle a privacy suit about this. But they still of they have lots of ways to use facial recognition to serve ads as well as to accumulate more data both on and offsite, as well as in store. Here’s just one example:
And now they’ve been hit with another lawsuit:
Install and run MalwareBytes on your computer and clean off all the malware than can cause ads and redirect your web browser. Safari isn’t a search engine, it’s not causing the extra ads. If they are showing up on google searches then it’s either malware or just Google’s normal tracking of your browsing, which is why you switched to DuckDuckGo. 
Definitely run MalwareBytes . It never finds anything on my Mac, but somehow on my parents’ Mac it always finds a couple random browser extensions. I don’t know how they manage to get them installed, but clearly the evil doers are managing to con my parents in to installing them, so if you are not super computer savvy,. definitely it is worth running MalwareBytes occasionally to detect such things.
A lot of the time people run into a web site that tells pops something up and tells them they need to update their flash player, click the link. And they do. 
That is something we should also develop a vaccine against. 