I don’t mean to pry – it’s probably none of my business, anyway - but why do we have such an ambivalent attitude towards privacy?

Even while going through divorce proceedings, a family lawyer warned this week, we seem impelled to risk the demolition of our case by publishing outrageously candid indiscretions on Facebook about our sex lives and drinking habits.

And yet we wouldn’t dream of divulging our salaries to anyone and, like thinking citizens everywhere, we worry about data protection, telephone hacking – and whether Big Brother is watching.

Facebook has long been cited in divorce cases, usually because one party in a marriage used the social network site to reconnect with an old flame.

The relationship revived and the spouse, eventually, spotted the flirtatious online chat and the affair was exposed.

National firm Russell Jones & Walker family law partner Caroline Watson has now alerted us to a new twist to the Facebook story.

She said: ‘Divorcing couples, even those going through a bitter divorce, inexplicably remain Facebook friends.

‘Their marriage is to all intents and purposes over, yet they can still see each other’s every move.

‘It’s as though they don’t mind being spied on as long as they can do the same themselves.

Even stranger, it’s as though they don’t mind giving their spouse’s divorce lawyer a windfall of evidence.’

Watson said it was ‘unbelievable’ that, upon starting divorce proceedings, the parting couple didn’t change their Facebook settings straightaway.

‘I’m going to be telling my entire team that from now on we should insert a paragraph to that effect in our client care letter,’ she said.

What sort of damaging detail might divorcing couples reveal on Facebook?

There’s the mother who argued for custody of the children because she is so much more responsible than that cheating father, but then undermined her case by posting on Facebook that she was so drunk on Saturday night that she can’t remember getting home.

At least she can’t have been that ‘wasted’, she adds, because she was able to put the chip fryer on the hob and make a late supper…

And then there is the father who pleads poverty whenever the question of maintenance is raised, and yet posts about his lavish holiday in Florida.

And the wife who lives alone, according to her divorce papers, but posts how she has discovered love with her ‘new live-in hunk of a man’.

And the man who, denying ‘unreasonable behaviour’, refuses to admit to committing adultery, yet a few months into divorce proceedings posts that he and his girlfriend have been ‘close for three wonderful years now’.

It’s amazingly candid and even more amazingly stupid, but still we do it.

Is it a latent tendency to exhibitionism, one wonders.

A desperate desire for that promised 15 minutes of fame?

A lemming-like urge for self-destruction, perhaps?

Sorry, I really don’t mean to pry.