Facebook doesn't sell data to advertisers. Do you have a source for your claim?
(It went much deeper than that - marital status, month of year, a few other things I can't remember). So, while they weren't directly offering and selling this information as is, you could buy it from them by buying ad space on the demographics you cared about. (Yes, this also required you had other access to ad networks, real time exchanges, etc -- but if you really want info on people, it was chump change)
I'm not sure how you would define "sell data", but other advertisers are using that data for targeting at scale already.