In a posting on its privacy blog, Facebook said the expanded archive feature would be introduced gradually to its 845 million monthly active users. It goes beyond the first archive made available in 2010, which has been criticized as incomplete by privacy advocates and regulators in Europe.
The archive Facebook published two years ago gave users a copy of their photos, posts, messages, list of friends and chat conversations. The new version, Facebook said, includes previous user names, friend requests and the Internet protocol addresses of the computers that users have logged in from. More categories of information will be made available in the future, Facebook said.
Online social networks offer free services to users and make money primarily through advertising, which can often be directed more effectively using the information the network has collected on them.
Facebook, which is preparing for an initial public stock offering, most likely in May, has been trying to accommodate government officials in Europe, where privacy laws are more stringent than in the United States. .
Facebook’s data collection practices have tested the boundaries of Europe’s privacy laws. The social networking site, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is Europe’s leading online network, according to comScore, a research firm in Reston, Va.
Last December, the Irish Data Protection Commission reached an agreement with Facebook, which runs its international businesses from offices in Dublin, to provide more information to its users and amend its data protection practices. “We took up their recommendation to make more data available to Facebook users through this expanded functionality,” the company said in a statement.
Facebook agreed to make those changes by July. In Europe, 40,000 Facebook users have already requested a full copy of the data that the site has compiled on each of them, straining the company’s ability to respond. Under European privacy law, the company must comply with the requests within 40 days.
Max Schrems, the German law student who filed the complaint leading to the agreement with the Irish authorities, criticized Facebook’s latest offer as insufficient.
“We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” said Mr. Schrems, a student at the University of Vienna. “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.”
In 2011, Mr. Schrems requested his own data from Facebook and received files with information in 57 categories. The disclosure, Mr. Schrems said, showed that Facebook was keeping information he had previously deleted from the Web site, and was also storing information on his whereabouts, gleaned from his computer’s I.P. address.
Facebook’s data collection practices are being scrutinized in Brussels as European Union policy makers deliberate on changes to the European Data Protection Directive, which was last revised in 1995. The commissioner responsible for the update, Viviane Reding, has cited Facebook’s data collection practices in pushing for a requirement that online businesses delete all information held on individuals at the user’s request.
Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer with Latham & Watkins in Hamburg, said he thought it was unlikely that the European Union would enact laws that would significantly restrict the use of customized advertising, which is at the core of the business model for Web sites like Facebook. It is more likely, Mr. Börger said, that lawmakers would require Facebook and other networking sites to revise their consent policies to make them more easy to understand. But it was unlikely that Facebook would be legally prevented from using information from individuals who sign up for the service.
“I don’t see any fundamental change,” Mr. Börger said. “It comes back to the question of consent. 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.”

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And this from the BBC regarding the reaction in Europe (also April 12, 2012):

Facebook criticised over data download tool

Facebook has updated a tool that lets users look at some of the data the social network holds on them.
The update gives people an "expanded archive" of their activity on Facebook letting them see friend requests and login locations.
Facebook said other categories of data would be added in the future.
Campaigners said the data shared did not go far enough and handed over only a "fraction" of the information European laws demand.
Raw access
Facebook's Download Your Information tool was first introduced in 2010 and gave people a digital copy of the photos, posts and messages they had shared on the social network.
Those who took the chance to get their archive got a compressed file full of data.
In a blogpost explaining the change, Facebook said the updated tool would be gradually rolled out to all users.
Campaigners said the change should have included much more information. The download tool supplied data in 22 categories, far fewer than the 84 demanded by European law, said Max Schrems, an Austrian law student who founded the Europe v Facebook pressure group.
He said updating the tool was an attempt to "fool" users as it did not give people access to the raw data they were entitled to.
Europe v Facebook had filed several complaints about Facebook's privacy policy, he said, but they would not have been able to do this if they had relied only on the processed data provided by the download tool.
Instead, Mr Schrems and other campaigners used an online form on Facebook to request the unprocessed data held on them. Facebook removed this form after 40,000 people used it to lodge requests to see their data.
Facebook has faced persistent criticism over what it does with the data people surrender about their lives and relationships.
In late 2011, the Irish data protection commissioner issued a report on Facebook's privacy policy and said it should give people better access to their data and do more to tell them what is done with it.
The commissioner said it planned to conduct a formal review of the progress Facebook has made towards complying with the recommendations in July 2012.