The company sent out a message to its users on Wednesday explaining that it had received "a lot of questions and comments" on its decision. "Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg had previously defended the change in terms and conditions, which would have enabled the company to retain photos, status updates and wall posts, among other assets uploaded by users, even after they had left the service. He had said that the T&Cs were necessary because copies of these assets were also created in friends' accounts when they were shared with other users.

"We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear," Zuckerberg had said, vowing that Facebook wouldn't sell the information on to third parties.

Facebook has come under considerable scrutiny for its privacy practices before, particularly during the launch of its Beacon service in 2007, when it began sharing information with third party sites about users' activities and purchases, initially without their consent. This led to a class action lawsuit against the firm, which subsequently changed Beacon to be an opt-in system that could be turned off entirely.