Sometimes this is true, however many phones come with fbook preinstalled and some make it very difficult to remove it. Another recent story showed how fbook is

Sometimes this is true, however many phones come with fbook preinstalled and some make it very difficult to remove it. Another recent story showed how fbook is embedded with many other apps, at least api calls and such. so even if you don't install the fbook or messenger and never visit the site on that deivice, sometimes installing other apps that make api calls and send tons of data to fbook on thier (your behalf) - so it's not so cut and dry. I'd also argue that most people do not know how fbook gets and uses data on your device that you are not explicitly adding - they also don't know how this can affect other people in their vicinity or included in pics or contacts for example. fb's spying is more pervasive than most know, and it's added by other apps without notice as well sometimes. Is it spying if they record your info when you browse webmd or some other site that has beacons there? It may not be installed on your phone in that case, bit it's certainly spying imho. So is Big g analytics and others in many of those cases for that matter. I don't think there any users who can truly control / stop this kind of thing (maybe .001% ?). There is virtually no education on these things. Short of a host file blackhole for known urls / ips - the normalization of this level of data collection and spying is amazing.