Reports have speculated that the popular social networking website, Facebook has hired a team of lobbyists in order to try and sway the authorities and governments on its privacy regulations.

Over the year, the social networking site has seem tremendous growth, jumping from 50 million users globally, as recorded in January 2009, to over 350 million worldwide users in less than 12 months. But Facebook's founder, 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg, has realized that the biggest problem now is how to effectively manage the privacy of all users of a platform which is growing so rapidly.

With so much personal information on its servers, Facebook is now coming under the scrutiny microscope of the governments and campaign groups.

Earlier during the year, the website had settled a law suit worth $9.5 Million (5.9 Million Pounds) regarding an intrusive advertising system which was launched in 2007, and last month, the site had made some tweaks which ended up exposing personal information of millions of users to the whole world, which angered many privacy advocates.

To deal with such problems, the company spent all of the past year hiring a team of lobbyists across Washington and Brussels to push its cause with politicians.