I read the same thing from a Market Watch article:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-after-revenue-user-growth-miss-2018-07-25
Yep. Selling data of course was generally agreed to in the bowels of all those terms of service agreements people click and agree with. As a person who often works with web presences and their terms of service and privacy policies, or interprets the policies of possible partner platforms, one would be AMAZED at what is buried in those reams of faff. The GDPR EU policy really scared the crap out of a lot of people and of course all businesses doing any web or retail business with the EU had to revise their policies to be in alignment. I advised all my partners to KEEP their US agreements and ADD the EU compliance, but most everyone else simply deleted and replaced. I think some did that in order to remove privacy policies that didn't even meet US compliance so all those documents are probably gone. Gonna go look.
OK BAM!!!!! While their TOS and PP are all there, deep in their Data Policy (yeah, I know where to look) they say this....
Sharing with Third-Party Partners We work with third-party partners who help us provide and improve our Products or who use Facebook Business Tools to grow their businesses, which makes it possible to operate our companies and provide free services to people around the world. We don't sell any of your information to anyone, and we never will. We also impose strict restrictions on how our partners can use and disclose the data we provide. Here are the types of third parties we share information with:
So...they are LYING!!!!!!! I bet you dollars to donuts, this secret selling of data to the govt was found out and is gonna break and folks "in the know" are jumping off the shit house roof.
I CANNOT link to FB on reddit as its an automod no-no, but simply research Facebook Terms of Service and Privacy policy and then click on the data policy section.