I hate to be a tin foil hat on this, but it really seems like a perfect way to get people to turn over even more personal/private information (especially the kinds they don't usually post in a day-to-day status update, like date of graduation, age, schools, etc) for Facebook to sell to advertisers.

Facebook doesn't sell anyone's data to advertisers - we let advertisers target ads based on certain criteria. I'm curious what makes you think we sell people's data? (I'm an engineer at Facebook.)

Perhaps I am generalizing too much - what I truly meant was this feature enables Facebook to have even more fine-grained criteria on which to sell ads.

Which criteria?

Criteria like age, location, education, interests etc. You can see the entire list when creating a Facebook ad: http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/. But the advertisers don't get to see what belongs to who, unless someone clicks on an ad, buys something and they backtrace all of that. They only target it.

Not a chance they would sell data, that would be a one-off! You want to "rent" access to the data clusters to advertisers without providing them ways to bypass you in the future!

Very, very good point. I don't know why I didn't think of this. Thanks!