Thomas Crampton: How Facebook ended my marriage - UPDATED

Facebook has implemented fixes that should prevent this from happening again, but -- tech journalist Thomas Crampton experienced an unfortunate side effect of that Facebook personal profile bug I blogged about here yesterday. Thomas says:

A misguided attempt to increase our privacy backfired horribly a few days ago, just weeks ahead of our wedding.

My fiancee and I unchecked the personal relationship box in Facebook to make our personal lives a little more private.

Unwittingly, however, that action sent out a message to our entire social network and newsfeed saying we were no longer engaged. (Complete with a forlorn broken heart.)

Within minutes, condolence notes started coming in from around the world, sending us into even high state of crisis than just a wedding.

Link. In other news, looks like some of Thomas' friends need to learn how to STFU on Twitter.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Boarding pass hacker finds privacy flaws in Facebook

Update: Christopher Soghoian, whose recent security research on Facebook I blogged here, writes:

You just blogged: "Facebook has implemented fixes that should prevent this from happening again, but -- tech journalist Thomas Crampton experienced an unfortunate side effect of that Facebook personal profile bug I blogged about here yesterday. Thomas says:"

This is not correct. The Facebook attack I exposed dealt specifically with random strangers being able to play go-fish with private elements in your profile. Facebook fixed this with some haste, such that private profiles of strangers will no longer show up in a search on any sensitive fields.

Crampton's problem stems from the Facebook mini-feeds feature. You covered that train-wreck of a privacy problem last year (Link).

The common theme here is that Facebook has very very fine grained privacy controls - which most users clearly do not know how to use. Crampton could have quite easily modified his privacy settings to stop his friends from seeing changes in his relationship status - but he didn't know to do this.

The cynic in me wonders how we can expect regular users to know the finer details of privacy control customization when a tech journalist can't figure it out.