Social networking giant Facebook (News - Alert) decided to address criticism of its privacy practices today, by providing its users with an expanded archive of the data collected, stored and tracked by the site. A downloadable archive feature already existed, but as the site posted on its privacy blog, the downloadable archive feature will soon expand.

This feature, called simply Download Your Information, provides greater transparency on the types of information stored. The expanded archive will be gradually rolled out to Facebook's 845 million monthly active users and improves upon the first iteration of the feature introduced in 2010.

Facebook hopes it can appease the critical reception of the original archive feature by privacy advocates and regulators.

Facebook generates through advertising, primarily by way of collecting extensive information on its millions of users and selling each individual's profile to advertising companies. This is the reason Facebook shelled $1 billion to purchase Instagram earlier this week – to gather more information to sell.

The 2010 archive provided users with copies of their photos, posts, messages, list of friends and chat conversations. The new version will also include previous user names, friend requests and Internet protocol (IP) addresses of each computer users sign in from. Facebook plans to provide more categories of information as time goes on.

Max Schrems, a German law student who filed a complaint against Facebook's privacy policies last December, still found Facebook's latest archive update to be insufficient.

Facebook is "still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” he said. The University of Vienna student added that "With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”

While there is speculation that the European Union may enact laws which would significantly restrict Facebook's business model of targeted advertising, but critics like Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Hamburg, are skeptical any change will be made.

“At the end of the day, it comes back to the question of consent," said Börger. "They cannot go so far as to prohibit things that people are willing to consent to. That would violate an individual’s freedom to receive services they want to receive.”