evidence: The question of whether social media companies "sell" their users’ data was thrust back into the spotlight last week when a trove of internal emails from Facebook’s senior executives was released by the British Parliament. Among them was a chain featuring none other than Mark Zuckerberg himself proposing the idea of actually charging a monetary fee for developers to access user data, which they could repay either by purchasing advertising, selling items or simply writing Facebook a check. While the company took great pains to emphasize last week that it never ended up following through with the proposal, the mere fact that the company’s founder had openly discussed quite literally charging a per-user fee to access user data really drove home how the company views its users as monetizable entities being exploited by a for-profit company, rather than a benevolent company trying to connect the world and generating revenue only where it would not conflict with its public good vision.