I guess it depends on how you define social media—if you think of it purely as Facebook as social media, that's its business model and that's how it operates. I take a broader definition of social media, because the kinds of social media kids use include games and all kinds of different things.
A lot of the more successful online games for kids are subscription models. They pay a monthly fee. There's no real reason to do this additional data-mining. It's extra money, I guess, and extra insight into the market, but a lot of that could probably be done—in terms of insight into the market—with permission and consent and a more transparent process.
Take an example like Club Penguin. It's owned by Disney. It was a Canadian company, and there are still links to the Canadian company that founded it. It's a subscription model. Kids pay a nominal monthly fee to play it. It's enormously popular. They don't do third-party advertising, so there's not that explicit link, and any data mining they do is in-house. We don't know what that might be, but to say that data mining and selling the data is completely necessary for them to function is not at all true. They have tens of millions of players paying money every month for the opportunity to play.
I guess it would depend on the definition.