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:
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.
