I have a similar memory from a later blizzard. A friend visited to sleep over the first night of the storm and ended up staying 5 days until the roads were cleared enough to pass. Several dozers got stuck trying to clear the roads into the valley we lived.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1997_North_American_storm_complex
No, you don’t have to interact with Meta. Websites that utilize Facebook ads in some fashion will install a Meta Pixel to their site in order to track users and better target their ads. That information can be correlated to others in the same household extremely easily.
You can read about the specifics of how Meta does it in their developer information here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/meta-pixel/