It's remarkable how common this opinion is given its obvious shallowness. Nobody has to use Facebook. What are the consequences of not? You can't chat with your friends or view their selfies or see event listings. Or rather to do these things, you have to make an effort to use some other more private mode of communication like phone or in-person or classifieds or whatever. It's easier to use Facebook than to not.
That is an extremely far cry from "having to" use the service. The problem really is people are lazy, and use Facebook because it saves them time, effort, and energy. In most cases, people care about this saved energy more than they do their privacy.
Many people's friends communicate primarily via Facebook, and you can't just get around that by using phones and emails. People have discussions, invite people to events and post important life updates on Facebook. Often the primary communication mechanism for an organisation or even a local business will be Facebook. And they often won't re-circulate all that information via email just for the benefit of people who don't use it.
And yet people insist on trivialising these costs, and blaming individuals for this massive invasion of privacy because they chose not to incur these costs, rather than questioning the circumstances that have led to people feeling forced to make such a choice.
Do you really think the people who are having their privacy violated explicitly chose that trade off because they're "lazy"? Or do you think, presented with a choice between signing up to a seemingly innocuous helpful website, or encroaching social isolation as their friends start using it, they chose the former?
So to get gigs, I had to make a Facebook account. Granted, I tried to put as little as possible on it.
Until very recently, a few friends had me trapped their too. They couldn't pay their phone bill. So no texts or calls. Would just steal wifi from some store, use Facebook messenger. I harassed them to get email, IRC, anything else. But they couldn't be bothered to learn those things.
I know this sounds like the stupidest thing ever. It reminds me of people taking out payday loans or going to check cashing places, because they're too poor to go to the bank.
Anyway, two of them finally got phone numbers, so Facebook is deleted now.
I didn't mean that using facebook is a requirement for life and I'm not sure why your first inclination is to read others' comments that way.
People are mad at FB the same way people get mad when they realize they've been in manipulative relationships, but I'm not sure many people really want to accept that they gave into that despite all the warning signs that have been there for years and it's their own actions which enabled FB to be what it is.
Some of the issue is the belief that anyone really needs FB. We've conditioned ourselves into it, but you don't need it any more than you need TV.
Most FB users certainly do not expect that they are sending out their photos and opinions and chats to millions of people. They have a circle of friends and family that they think are behind a wall called their network, and that circle is usually a few hundred people or less.
To run with the simile, maybe some people remain in abusive relationships because of a reasonable fear that leaving will have consequences that are worse than staying.