"I'm not a stalker," insists observant Facebook user

A man who understandably wishes to remain anonymous yesterday committed a major gaffe by letting slip to a co-worker his awareness of a Facebook photo she and a mutual friend had been commenting on extensively.

"He just dropped it into conversation," the co-worker said.

"It was so awkward. How could he have known that? It was a private exchange just between myself, my friend, and every single one of our mutual friends who could see it in their news feed," she elaborated.

"It's so inappropriate that he should know that!"

Other workers who witnessed the incident described it as "truly cringeworthy".

"You could see from the moment he said it, he realised it was one of those things he should simply be aware of, but never raise in social conversation," Samantha Preemslydale recalled.

This is not the first time that the privacy of Facebook has been an issue of public debate. The International Stalking Education and Evaluation Union (ISEEU) have previously condemned the "inexcusably lax" privacy settings of the popular social networking site.

"It's just putting people like us out of a job," ISEEU Treasurer Tom Peeper said.

"Once upon a time, there was an art to stalking. It was a kind of flirtatious, wild, foreplay, to unravel the secret web of facts that are hidden behind the person in the street.

"Since Facebook, everything is laid bare. It's no longer a challenge, and not nearly as rewarding."

Facebook have urged people to ignore the fact that everything they put on Facebook is Facebook's property, and to continue to upload their lives into the social networking site, which is used to attract targeted advertisements.

8.40pm update: The man has been identified as Gerald Driver, a 29 year old man who lives in Essex, UK.

His birthdate is 15th August 1981, and he is a fan of 'I'm the boy who lived LOL JKS I'm Cedric Diggory', 'I lock my animal in my room when I get lonely', and 'When I'm home alone and I hear a noise...I completely freeze'.

He states his political views as 'socially conservative, economically neo-liberal', is interested in women, looking for 'friendship', and his favourite quotations include Winston Churchill's "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."

He has 214 friends and his last status update was "Gerald Driver has had enough of embarasing himself lol!"