According to a Facebook report published this week, the site has seen a 24 percent increase in government requests for user information between the second half of 2013 and the first half of 2014. There were almost 35,000 total requests, and disturbingly, the United States government accounted for nearly half that with 15,433 requests alone.…

Fed up with the baby pictures her friends constantly posted to Facebook, Dutch designer Laura Comet has created a toy that would allow babies to post pictures of themselves to social media. The toy, which was Comet’s graduation project at a design academy, serves as plush mobiles that hang above a baby’s crib. When the…

According to a report released by Mother Jones late last week, Facebook experimented with its user’s News Feeds during the 2012 election in an effort to get them to vote. The study moved news features higher in News Feeds during the election to see if more exposure to these events could encourage users to vote.…

According to Reuters, New York prosecutors have recovered $18 million in government and civil fraud cases using warrants to search Facebook accounts. However, Facebook is disputing the warrants as unconstitutional, claiming that the searches violated the rights of the 381 users who had photos, messages and other private content confiscated. 130 indictments were brought in…

The so-called “deep web” became familiar to mainstream web users last fall when Silk Road, a massive online underground black market, was busted by police. The controversy surrounding the site also informed many about the secretive world of secure online software and networks. In a surprising move, Facebook announced this week that it will be…

Facebook has made no secret of its efforts to collect the information of its 1.35-billion-strong user base. Every piece of information on the site is potentially valuable; it all adds up to create a fairly complete (and creepy) portrait of a user. Facebook proved that even more this week when it released data detailing how…

Facebook has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get involved in the online payments game. When code for a payment button was discovered in Facebook’s Messenger app, no one was much surprised. Extending Facebook into one-click purchases seems like a natural, though somewhat troubling, extension of what the site already does.…

This week, Facebook officially launched Rooms, a new private conversation app that has been in the works for a while. However, the way the app turned out has taken many by surprise. The app lets users create, join or contribute to discussion boards, similar to popular online forum site Reddit. What’s important, however, especially given…

According to a recent New York Times profile of Arturo Bejar, the director of engineering for the Facebook Protect and Care team, the world’s largest social networking site is actively trying to make its users nicer and treat each other with more respect. Online discussions are often fraught with inappropriate and harassing language; the anonymity…

When Facebook formally apologized to the LGBT community for deactivating the accounts of drag queen performers because they were not identifying themselves using their real names, many assumed the issue was resolved. However, as reported by The Guardian last week, the site has continued to shut down accounts. According to Facebook, hundreds of accounts were…