Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Germany Is Attacking Facebook for the Wrong Reason

The regulatory attack on personal data harvesting is based on the unproven assumption that the data are valuable.

January 25, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Germany wants Facebook to be more transparent.
Photographer: STEFFI LOOS/AFP/Getty Images

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Of all the regulatory threats to Facebook's dodgy business model, Germany's is the hardest to shake off. The German Federal Cartel Office has questioned the company's use of third-party data to help target advertisements. Now that Chancellor Angela Merkel is likely to keep her job through 2021, Facebook faces ever-increasing pressure on this front. But no matter how unpleasant this challenge is to Facebook, it's not enough to bring about fundamental change.

U.S. internet giants are very much on Merkel's mind. Speaking at the Davos forum on Wednesday, she said: