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Today Facebook finally reached a settlement with the FTC over privacy concerns that have been haunting the social media behemoth as of late.

Facebook can't just up and change its privacy settings whenever it wants to. It must now obtain express consent from its users, first.

Since the settlement, Zuckerberg has penned a blog post outlining the Facebook features that the site has launched, which include friend lists, the ability to review tags before they appear on a profile, mobile versions of privacy controls, amount other notable updates. He also announced the splitting of the Chief Privacy Officer position into two parts, to be held by Erin Egan and Michael Richter in product and policy, respectively.

In September 2009, Baltimore-based software company WhoGlue Inc. filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Facebook. It claimed that Facebook "violated a patent awarded to WhoGlue in 2007 for an information management system to control personal information as human networks and technology increasingly mesh." The lawsuit was settled, and in early November 2011, Hardebeck sold his tiny two-person company, which consists of him and a developer in Berlin, to Facebook for an undisclosed amount.

Facebook may have acquired WhoGlue, but according to a repot from The Baltimore Sun, Hardebeck bought back "some assets, trademarks and customer relationships from Facebook." He has since renamed his company WhoGlue LLC.

This year's Facebook acquisitions are just the beginning of what's in store for the social media behemoth.

The Wall St. Journal's report today that Facebook will make an initial public offering on the stock market next year has been met with plenty of press comment on the expected size of the offering ($100B, huge) but seems to have left many other people unmoved.

It's easy to feel cynical about Facebook, a lot of people do. The news may be important for more than just holders of the stock, though. It could prove very big for the whole tech startup world and for those who enjoy the innovation that startups create. Why? Because the Facebook IPO could mean more and bigger startup acquisitions, more support for more startups and an infusion of smart money and experience into radically new tech experiments.

The European Commission is cracking down on the way Facebook gathers information about European users. A new EC Directive will ban targeted advertising unless users specifically say they want it. This is great news for European Facebook users, especially after the case of 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems who, in late October, started an online campaign aimed at forcing Facebook to abide by European data privacy laws.

The real question is: Why isn't this happening in America? All 800 million Facebook users agree to let the company use their personal information.

A Facebook spam attack has just hit the Facebook Help Center's Community Forum, flooding it with fake messages about livestreaming American football games. The spam appears to have come from compromised Facebook accounts, according to reports from Sophos. The suspicious activity was first reported by the unofficial Facebook privacy and security blog, aptly titled FacebookPrivacyAndSecurity.

Are you one of those people that aren't satisfied with the number of your Facebook friends, even if you have more than the average number of 190 as I mentioned in this article earlier in the week.

Are you always checking your Facebook page to see what your friends are doing?

Do you get the feeling you are missing out on something big when you choose to stay home rather than get all dolled up for a night out on the town?

Even though Facebook suffered social commerce fails with the Delta ticket window and the now-shuttered Facebook Deals, Facebook social shopping applications for Facebook still keep popping up.

A new study from Sociable Labs shows that 50% of shoppers are logged into Facebook while shopping on an e-commerce site. While that's interesting data in and of itself, the study does not prove any correlation between sharing on Facebook and shopping on e-commerce sites. In other words, businesses may see that their customers are on Facebook - because, really, who isn't on Facebook, save for the very paranoid - yet the idea of sharing what you buy through the world's largest social network has not, and will not, become a part of the Facebook user's experience. Unless it centers around an e-commerce site like EBay that people already know and trust.

So, there is going to be a Facebook Phone, if a week long series from AllThingsD can be trusted. It will come from HTC, the same original equipment manufacturer that brought us the ChaCha and the Salsa, some of the first smartphones with the "F" button concept that brought users straight to a Facebook interface for a social layer baked right into the device. Facebook needs to continue its hard push into mobile, but does a dedicated device, based on Android, make any sense?

Foremost, Facebook might want to consider changing the name of the mobile platform. Facebook Phone does not inspire confidence in consumers. It was code-named Buffy when it was being developed by a team of top-notch engineers more than a year ago. That was a derivative of the "social layer" that was nicknamed "slayer" by the group. One of the reasons that Google has done so well is because Android sounds cool and Google did not change the name when it bought the company from Andy Rubin in 2005. There is a lot of potential things to like, or hate, from a Facebook Phone. We examine those and it is also the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll. Vote below.

MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson used to be known as "MySpace Tom," because newly created Myspace accounts automatically included him as a default friend. Nowadays, he may as well be known as "Klout Tom," because of his usage of and influence on the leading social networks of this era: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Klout is a tool that measures your influence online. It puts a number on your ability to influence other people using social media. Tom's Klout score is 77, which is relatively high. If your work in any way involves social media, it's good to be influential in whatever your niche is. But is Klout really a meaningful way to track your influence? Should you be using it to help you in your career or life?

John Paul Titlow explains why he's turned off his Spotify integration in Facebook. It's not you Spotify, it's me... This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.