Facebook increases data limits on account history downloads

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Facebook on Thursday began letting members of the world’s leading online community take more of their pictures, posts, messages and other data home with them.

Facebook expanded the types of information its approximately 845 million members could download from their personal account histories to include data such as friend requests and IP addresses of computers used to log-in.

“This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future,” Facebook said in a message at its Public Policy Europe page.

The move comes as the California-based Internet star works to reassure regulators, members and advocacy groups concerned about how much privacy and control of personal information people have at Facebook.

The “Download Your Information” tool was launched in 2010 to allow Facebook members to keep copies of what they share with friends at the social network.

Facebook is expected to make a much-anticipated debut next month on the technology-heavy NASDAQ exchange. Facebook in February filed to go public and could raise as much as $10 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.

Facebook, which is shifting operations to a former Sun Microsystems campus in the California city of Menlo Park, had a reported net income of $668 million last year.

Revenue nearly doubled to $3.7 billion in 2011, with most of it coming from targeted advertising gleaned from personal information shared by the platform’s hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook’s value has been estimated at between $75 billion and $100 billion.

Facebook via 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com