As Facebook fleshes out its business model around a social market and the mobile space, the network faces scrutiny for how it manages private data, having to justify the updates it pushes through.  This week’s already been particularly busy for Facebook.  The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has notified the Congress it will carry out its plans, and grant third party developers access to users’ home addresses and phone numbers.  “In a letter to Representatives Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), the world’s leading social network stressed that it will let users decide whether to give contact information to developers and websites.”

Facebook did not specify how it will “highlight the changes to its members.”  The social networking giant is making use of its big data trends to facilitate more – if not controversial – features and monetization methods. The latest of these new features is an updated third party website plugin, which now gives sites access to the new user-moderator, user identity and threading tools recently rolled out recently on users’ walls. A number of sites, including Discovery.com, Redbook.com, Examiner.com, SportingNews.com, SBNation.com, and Economist.com, have already implemented the update.

In addition to privacy policy changes and an update to its plugin, Facebook had yet another update this week. ZDNet reports the social network acquired group messaging app Beluga, for an undisclosed amount. “It’s not clear whether Beluga will exist as its own entity now that Facebook has acquired it, but we sure hope not. Ideally, all of Beluga’s functionality should be integrated into the various Facebook apps on all the different platforms.”

Facebook is definitely geared for growth even without these updates, but they do reflect its plans around big data monetization and product development. Incidentally, eMarketer released a report predicting Facebook will overthrown Yahoo as the U.S.’s biggest online display ads seller by 2012. Facebook’s share of the market will reach at least 23.8%, compared to Yahoo’s 16.4%.  Yahoo’s fears have come true, as it loses ground to Facebook and Microsoft.  With these outstanding predictions around Facebook’s ability to dominate display ads, the market shift and social networking validation is quite evident.