I'm really not sure that makes you right. It's a fact that FAN is 2% or so of revenue for FB. And it's also a fact that FB, with their analytics/ads SDK and all the data they ingest from their own applications, already owns a very important data source for their targeted ads. These are plain as day facts. If you ever bought ads, you'd know that FAN, for the typical buyers, represents a tiny fraction of spend on FB (less than 5% typically). Then journalists can write what they want, as much as I like Arstechnica and pay for it, that's just plain wrong and countered by facts. It's also frankly funny how little journalists know about ads when in most cases it's the source of their income.

Furthermore, it's absolutely hilarious to think that the most valuable company in the world, with enough cash reserves to be able to almost buy FB outright, would somehow be willing to walk back their core value message because their, allegedly, value adversary asks. Apple made the change because they would have cratered their app economy and they themselves weren't going to play by their own rules, FB maybe played a role because $2B are a lot of money for the free apps, but they aren't a lot of money for FB. It's really hilarious to think that Apple gives a crap about what FB writes on their site, specifically when it's about privacy. Apples cares about its ecosystem, not about what FB says. Totally hilarious.