SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook and Microsoft Corp. representatives said that after negotiations with national security officials their companies have been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data. The announcements Friday night come at the end of a week when Facebook, Microsoft and Google, normally rivals, had jointly pressured the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on national security orders.

Some two-thirds of American parents monitor their children's Facebook activities, but a large percentage say they trust their youngsters to manage on their own, a study showed Thursday. The survey by the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California found 70 percent of parents keep tabs on their kids' Facebook accounts. Some 46 percent had passwords.

By Clare Jim, Reiji Murai and Poornima Gupta (Reuters) - Apple Inc is exploring launching iPhones with bigger screens, as well as cheaper models in a range of colors, over the next year, said four people with knowledge of the matter, as it takes a cue from rival Samsung Electronics.

Facebook on Wednesday added Twitter-style hashtags to help the more than one billion members of the social network tune into topics of interest at the leading social network. "To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what's happening or what people are talking about," Facebook product manager Greg Lindley said in a blog post. "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."