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Facebook has clarified its policy against nudity to allow for postmastectomy photos after a run-in with vocal breast cancer awareness advocates disgruntled by the social network's practice of removing photos depicting mastectomy scars.

In May, Scorchy Barrington, a woman with Stage IV breast cancer, petitioned Facebook executives through Change.org to end the company's practice of censoring photos of men and women who have undergone mastectomies. Barrington said Facebook was removing photos from the SCAR Project Page, which features photographs of young breast cancer survivors, and that Facebook had banned project founder and photographer David Jay from the … Read more

More than 900 kilometers from Stockholm, at the edge of Arctic Circle, Facebook's latest data center is churning through status updates, messages, photos, ads, and other output from among the company's 1.1 billion worldwide users, most of whom are outside the U.S.

The 290,000 square-foot facility in Lulea, Sweden, also known as the Node Pole, takes advantage of the abundance of water and cool climate to go more green. It relies on the relatively cheap hydro-electric energy available to power its servers and the icy Nordic air to keep them cool.

In addition, the Lulea … Read more

Facebook has added support for hashtags, fixing a broken link that prevented its 1.11 billion members from associating themselves with celeb gossip, breaking news, and popular memes.

"Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion," the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday announcing the update. "When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Tuesday that it is considering requests from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft that would let them clear their names after allegations they opened their networks to government spies, although U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has not yet issued a decision on the matter.

In response to queries from CNET, the Justice Department said late this afternoon: "The department has received the letter from the chief legal officer at Google. We are in the process of reviewing their request."

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, sent an open letter to Holder … Read more

Facebook's stockholder meeting showed off two kinds of Facebook investor: the type with sour grapes and the kind who's totally bewildered by the site. The latter proved more vocal, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent much of his time during the one-hour, question-and-answer session responding to rants from older stock owners stumped by how the social network works.

Tuesday, the 9-year-old company convened its shareholders at the Westin San Francisco Airport hotel for its first annual meeting with the mission to approve four business proposals. The proposals, including one to reelect the company's eight nominated board members, all … Read more

The Vine is pretty clever. It shows, in six rapid seconds, how to quickly and easily put up a simple bookshelf.

Done in the stop-motion technique that has been the hallmark of most of the best Vines to surface so far, the video is an ad for Lowe's home improvement stores, and is part of a series called, appropriately, #lowesfixinsix.

Published more than three weeks ago, the video got a fresh life today when Twitter featured it as the inaugural poster child for its new #CreativeFavorites program, an initiative that aims to celebrate the best work being done on … Read more

Facebook Home may have fallen flat among users initially, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg assured shareholders on Tuesday that he has big plans for the software suite.

He said the company will eventually distribute Home -- which blankets your mobile device with your News Feed -- through its Android app, once it's perfected.

"We haven't really made our big push yet ... biggest thing that we're going to do once we feel that we're ready is to encourage people who have the Facebook app to go turn this on from within the app," Zuckerberg said at … Read more

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg reiterated Tuesday that the social network does not work directly with the National Security Agency or any other government agency to provide direct access to its servers.

"We don't work directly with the NSA or any other program in order to proactively give any user information to anyone," Zuckerberg told shareholders at the company's annual stockholder meeting. "No one has ever approached us to do anything like that, like what was reported...No agency has any direct access to our servers."

Zuckerberg was responding to recent reports about the … Read more

Google has agreed to acquire Waze, the Israel-based company behind the mapping app Facebook was also reportedly vying for, according to blog posts from both Google and Waze.

The deal, for which terms weren't disclosed, follows months of speculation about who would land the startup. Reports later in the day pegged the price at a little more than $1 billion. In recent days, Google was said to be close to a $1.3 billion deal and that Facebook talks had fallen apart.

The acquisition could help Google improve its own mapping services and put a bigger moat around them … Read more