[corin_]

Facebook were accused of exactly this in one line of questioning to Zuckerberg during last week's congressional hearing. Though I'm not sure if the implication was that they had done something illegal, or that they had done something which ought to be illegal.

Zuckerberg first said he wasn't aware of the situation being referred to (an old free VPN app that FB allegedly acquired to use for data harvesting); and then later asked to correct his testimony saying something along the lines of that he does remember, but the name of the app used (in the question) wasn't familiar to him so he had needed his memory jogged (presumably by an off-camera lawyer while he was muted).

I wondered whether it was intentional - claim ignorance to avoid the hard questions then fix the record later to avoid perjury while also avoiding follow up questions...

Edit: since parent wrote "data from millions of businesses" I should clarify that I don't have knowledge of what data FB are accused of harvesting, I think the idea was that it was data from consumers giving them a competitive advantage in considering what companies to acquire.

[nl]

Facebook wasn't buying and selling stock in public companies they gathered data on, and additionally didn't have a contractual arrangement with those companies to keep data about traffic to them private.

There's plenty of precedent for this kind of behavior: Comscore buys traffic data from ISPs and sells the aggregated insights. Supermarkets count sales and create in-house brands to compete with the vendors they sell products for.