Not having a Facebook account doesn't put you totally outside of Facebook's sphere of knowledge. If any of your friends has allowed Facebook to vacuum up their contacts list, Facebook knows you exist and have a shadow profile for you. Piece by piece, they can compile a substantial amount of information about you even though you've never signed up.

However I agree with your basic premise, that Google is an even worse threat. From using uMatrix and paying attention to what 3rd party shit websites pull in, it seems like Google's surveillance net is far wider than Facebook's. If you consider the possibility of AWS being used by Amazon for surveillance, then Amazon seems to have more reach than Facebook too. But all of them plainly have more reach than anybody should be comfortable with.

I use a standard set of privacy tools, so Facebook is almost universally blocked from my life. Their shadow profile is probably pretty thin, but I agree they are still a threat. But no-where near as bad as Google.

I hadn't considered Amazon. Maybe we should add Cloudflare to the mix now as well? (in the same vein of thought)

Hmm. I didn't understand you to be speaking specifically about your family above; in fact, if you read it again I'm sure you can understand how it came across as a sweeping generalization that simply isn't true for the 2.3B users of Facebook (vs ~2B for Google).

Edit: wait, you aren't even the person I replied to. I think that person's point, although I disagree with it, is more relevant than yours, and I'd like to hear how they came to their conclusion.

Yep, I generalized, perhaps I should have worded it differently. But as of right now, I can block Facebook 100% out of my life without a second thought. But I am stuck with Google.