According to a post in the September 23rd issue of the Financial Times, Facebook is partnering with a “controversial” data company called Datalogix that can “track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores.”
Of course, this announcement has raised concerns with privacy advocates who have continually been concerned about marrying online profiles and presence with offline data since the purchase of Abacus (a Datalogix competitor) by Doubleclick (an online ad-serving company later bought by Google) in the late 90s.