In news articles I have read about the Ashley Madison hack and data dump, the company suggests it was an inside job. I think I agree, but not in the way that they mean it. No, from what I have gleaned about this site from all the news articles I have read about it since the hack, it looks to me as though this site was intentionally set up to punish cheaters, and with that in mind, an inside job would make sense, in the sense that maybe the company secretly dumped all the data themselves. This is not an accusation, but rather, a theory intended as a joke.
But let’s look at the facts: Information, supposedly accurate, about this site reveals that the ratio of men to women was so uneven (five men to every one woman, reportedly), most of the men on the site were simply hoping or fantasizing about an affair that would never happen. Also, reportedly, to make up for the lack of women signed up, the company allegedly had oodles of fake female members for men to communicate with, and it cost money to communicate with anyone, with no guarantee of an affair, so obviously the company was simply bilking cheating male hearts out of money for nothing (not that I feel particularly sorry for these men, though…).
Also, I read there was a feature where a subscriber to this service could pay something like $250 for a guaranteed affair, and they’d get their money back if they didn’t have an affair after 3 months. Now, setting up a website for dating cheaters or swingers and charging a fee to use it is not illegal in itself, as the company simply sets up a vehicle for members to contact others and try to work something out themselves. But charging a specific fee for a guaranteed affair is, I believe, a form of solicitation for prostitution, is it not? It’s demanding payment for sex, and the site is acting like a pimp. Yuck. (<Not that the rest of it isn’t yucky as well…)
Additionally, as reported by the hackers, supposedly Ashley Madison charged users a fee to permanently delete their information, but they never deleted the user data as promised; they merely collected the money and ripped members off. (Some of these users will likely have their members ripped off in an entirely different manner now that their profiles have become public record.) Looks like the company was guilty of cheating more than any of its subscribers.
On top of all of this is the fact that Ashley Madison could have prevented the exposure of all its members’ information had they simply done what the hackers asked: shut the site down, at least temporarily. The company knew they had been hacked and they knew the data would be dumped, yet they did nothing to prevent their clients’ personal information from being revealed. Despite essentially being blackmailed (allegedly), Ashley Madison really had an ethical responsibility to prevent their members exposure at all costs, and they quite simply did not care enough about their members to even temporarily take the site offline to protect them. This makes them guilty of betraying their members all by itself.
If all of the above information is true, it’s clear that the biggest scumbag in all of this is Ashley Madison, not just for creating this reprehensible, cynical service in the first place, but for how unbelievably unethically it was run as a business. Based on how badly the company treated its members, it almost looks to me as though the website was actually set up to frustrate, bilk and punish cheaters from the get-go. And if that’s true, then it’s possible the hack and the leak were done by the company itself to further punish cheaters on the site, and possibly to frighten other cheaters not on the site into not cheating, or at least not cheating online with an electronic trail that can be exposed. Investors sure are lucky Avid Life Media didn’t launch that IPO they had been planning, as all that money would likely be down the drain due to the revelations about this company’s business practices.
And the company also potentially caused irreparable harm to who knows how many people whose email addresses may have been used to sign up for the service without their knowledge by someone else seeking to remain anonymous; by not verifying email addresses, Ashley Madison has potentially ruined the lives of innocent people, and this may be the most disgusting aspect of this whole sordid affair. Shame on this company for so many things they did on top of setting up a website for people to cheat on their spouses. What a bunch of jerks!
BTW: I read so many articles about this, as well as comments, and saw so many TV news reports about the Ashley Madison leak (out of a perverse sense of fascination that’s akin to watching a train wreck, actually), it will be difficult for me to be sure to accurately credit all the sources here; but I will add links to some of the articles and hope that adequately covers it (as if anyone ever checks the sources on this silly blog). They were all AP and Reuters stories (hosted through Yahoo! due to the comments sections being so amusing) online and CNN on TV that this blog post is based upon:
