Reports suggest that an agreement is close, awaiting approval from the FTC, which could mean that Facebook has to gain consent from users before changes are made to their privacy settings.According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook and the FTC have been in talks around the social networks privacy settings after changes it made in 2009 caused complaints from organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union about personal information being publicly available as a default setting.

The company could also find its privacy settings audited by the FTC for the next 20 years.

It is not yet known how the agreement could affect the company in countries outside the US. Neither the FTC or Facebook have officially announced the agreement yet and Facebook declined to comment.

In September Facebook found itself in separate privacy issues after a developer found that Facebook had been using a cookie which had the potential to track peoples web use on third party sites, even if they were logged off. Facebook said it has since disabled the cookie and had never used it for tracking people but its was intended to help with security issues such as identifying public computers.