Facebook is reportedly close to a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over its privacy policy changes in 2009, when the social networking site had announced changes to its members settings without taking their permission.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the proposed settlement comes after the FTC launched an investigation into the matter. According to the WSJ report, the settlement would require "Facebook to obtain users’ consent before making ‘material retroactive changes’ to its privacy policies.
The social networking company, with around 800 million users worldwide, must get consent from the user to share data unless agreed to by the user, as per the settlement.
Facebook has also agreed to privacy audits. The company has not commented on the matter so far.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that other Web companies have collected "huge amount of information" about users through cookies. This, he claimed was "less transparent than what is happening at Facebook."
