Your Facebook News Feed was likely flooded in color over the weekend, thanks to the site's rainbow filter tool.

More than 26 million Facebook members — including celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Anne Hathaway and Arnold Schwarzenegger — rainbow-ified their profile pictures in support of LGBT rights, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage nationwide. Those pictures received more than half a billion likes and comments, the company told Mashable.

See also: Facebook is changing how it counts Likes

If these numbers are any indication, it's evident Facebook continues to closely track and collect data about user activity. But reports have called out Facebook for possibly implementing the tool as one of its research experiments to learn more about its users and ultimately serve its advertising platform.

While tracking was never denied, the company says the tool's intention has nothing to do with ads.

Image: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

"This was not an experiment or test, but rather something that enables people to show their support of the LGBTQ community on Facebook," a company spokesperson told Mashable “We aren't going to use this as a way to target ads and the point of this tool is not to get information about people.”

According to the company, the rainbow filter was built by two interns during an internal hackathon recently. After it became a hit within the company, the interns worked with a larger team to add the tool to the site before Pride weekend and the SCOTUS ruling.

The tool was added to the site just as Facebook shared for the first time that more than 6 million of its U.S. members identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or gender non-conforming. Meanwhile, nearly 1 million have joined a Facebook group in support of the LGBTQ community.

While Facebook says it won't be sharing the user data and information collected via the rainbow filter with advertisers, it is a reminder the site is tracking everything it can about its users.

Facebook's comments come less than a year after we learned of secret research experiments conducted from user data. Since then, the company has been more transparent about its approaches to studies. The company outlined its research efforts and launched a Research page where it publishes the studies it conducts.

Facebook acknowledges the power of data collection, and said if it didn't conduct research and look deeper into the data it collects, it would be sticking its head in the sand. In the future, however, the company could potentially look into movements like the support of the LGBTQ community to identify trends, the company added.

While Facebook said ad targeting may not be on the company's radar for the rainbow filter tool, Nicole DeMeo, chief marketing officer of global mobile marketing company glispa, told Mashable there is a place for all types of data when it comes to marketing, including profile picture updates that support the LGBT community.

"Any type of data insight provides greater insight for user profiling," she added. "If a company like Facebook or even our own has asked for permission to use the data then it can only help a network in providing more targeted offers to that person/user."

"If a person uses the rainbow filter, we can assume that they're in support of LGBT rights; in theory, a network could then send offers such as LGBT related events, content and media to that user," DeMeo continued. "For someone in support of pride and the landmark Supreme Court decision, this is another data point or gateway to help serve more targeted offers. This both serves the network well and it serves the user, so that brands and organizations can find their audiences and it’s better for the user by cutting out the clutter of intrusive, irrelevant ads."

At least that's the theory, but as Facebook and Google have learned, even with benign intentions, this kind of data collection and analysis can erode customer trust, rightly or wrongly. At the same time, Facebook has a responsibility to improve the experience of its service, ads included, and it needs data on user behavior to do that.

"As someone once said, ‘marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed,'" DeMeo said.