Facebook has filed its plans for an initial public offering of stock to raise $US5b.

They may be going public with the biggest ever float by an internet company, but the main issue for Facebook remains that of privacy, the social network’s chief engineer, Lars Rasmussen says.

Rasmussen said the company may not always get it right but made sure to listen to the concerns of the site’s estimated 800 million users.

“Getting privacy right – the balance between giving people the right tools to keep the data only to the people that they want to see it, and making it easy to share – that is always going to be our main challenge,” Mr Rasmussen said.

“We want people to know what happens with the data they put on the site and under which conditions, and then give them all the tools to manage that.

“One of the most challenging things with a company like ours is when we provide a new feature on the site.

“Educating our users on how it relates to the existing privacy settings on the site is a very important challenge for us.”

He also said the company was not afraid to change the functionality of the site based on user feedback.

“We have a saying here: ‘Move fast and break things’ – which is a very integral part of our engineering culture and the way we think of advancing the product.

“We are always willing to let go of something we have built in the past in order to produce something much better that our users love. We change it because we believe we have something much better to offer them.

“The truth is we don’t know that until we build it and try it and get it out there.”

The tech giant this week filed papers for an initial public offering and hope to raise $US5 billion ($4.67 billion) in capital.