What Facebook Takes, What Facebook Keeps
The newspapers won’t stop. Facebook is evil—it harvests your data, destroys careers, sells your soul by the megabyte. Alongside Google and Amazon it forms some unholy triangle of insatiable surveillance capitalism, and at the end of it all there’s a reckoning coming. Or so the coverage goes, every week, reliably.
A survey commissioned by a German newspaper found that around 42 percent of Germans are genuinely afraid of Facebook—roughly two in five. The anxiety ran highest among people with lower levels of formal education, though about 20 percent of that group also reported not knowing what Facebook actually was. Alexander Kolb, a researcher at the market analysis firm GfK, said the result surprised him: I had actually expected critical attitudes to increase with higher education. That’s not what the data shows.
The least afraid: teenagers and students, burning through it daily, entirely unbothered by whatever warnings the adults had prepared.
Around 60 percent of 14-to-19-year-olds were using it without apparent concern, and no amount of parental warning about future employers or digital permanence was going to change that. All their friends were on it. Their friends would know if they weren’t. Platform-as-social-gravity. You don’t so much choose to join as eventually stop resisting.
There’s a version of this story for every generation. The one before this dealt with StudiVZ—Germany’s homegrown Facebook precursor—which everyone quietly distrusted but everyone used because the alternative was being unreachable. Same logic, different interface. Nobody trusted it. Everyone logged in anyway. The distrust became background noise and then eventually everyone migrated to the next thing regardless.
I use Facebook every day. On my phone, on my laptop, logged in at all times—not actively watching it, but aware it’s there, a door I could walk through whenever I wanted. I work in a field where social media isn’t optional: if you’re not on it professionally you don’t exist, and if you exist professionally you’re on it. That’s roughly the deal.
The surveillance argument has never particularly scared me. I’m not in a position where a boss can fire me over party photos. I’m not someone who has to think carefully about what a stranger does with a downloaded image. And if an algorithm wants to sell me something based on my browsing history—some of that targeting hits closer to home than you’d like to admit. I’m listening.
None of us can actually calculate what it’ll mean eventually—that we handed over this much about ourselves, on Facebook, on Twitter, in blogs. My instinct has always been to go on offense: flood the system with noise, give it so much information that the useful signal gets buried, and keep the things that actually matter somewhere quieter. Whether that strategy holds up, I genuinely don’t know.
Facebook is powerful the way infrastructure is powerful—so embedded in everything that opting out stops feeling like a real choice. The only protection is understanding the transaction and deciding deliberately what you’ll give and what you won’t. Not fear, not paranoia, not the helpless anxiety that convinces people to avoid the platform while the world carries on without them. Just some awareness that there’s a price, and some care about what you’re actually paying. That might be enough to stop it from harvesting your data, destroying your career, and selling your soul. Probably.