You know how those discussions panned out: Facebook still doesn't charge for user data. The company also settled its Moments trademark question without offering favors, according to spokespeople from Facebook and Tinder. Facebook added that the documents in question don't have "additional context," and the WSJ agrees. They're rarely definitive statements and are sometimes truncated, the paper said.

The emails in question might soon go public. The UK Parliament seized these and other documents from a third-party developer while he was in the country, and plans to publish them (in redacted form) within days. They were supposed to remain secret in the US, but that might not matter before long.

This is water under the bridge for Facebook, to a certain degree. However, it does show how the company wrestled with the balance between making money from its data and preserving some level of privacy. Not that this helped much in the long run. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and similar troubles have shown that data access remains a sore point regardless of Facebook's willingness to charge for access.